WHAT can one say about the creatures who run the publicity machine for Warner's, the distributors of the film, Michael Collins? Those people who read this column will be aware that I dislike Michael Collins's deeds with an overpowering intensity.
They were necessary only to those who wanted a violent resolution to this island's problems. No such violent resolution is possible. He used violence because he wanted to use violence. He and the Irish Republican Brotherhood did not want simple independence, negotiated patiently and peacefully, and with the democratic approval of the Irish people. He wanted to win a war, having helped start the war, and when trying to halt it, it consumed him.
Wasted genius
I deplore his wasted life, his wasted genius, and the moral contamination he spread amongst those he raised and trained to do the vile work of taking human life. But I am aware that I am in a minority, and a much despised minority too. No matter. But surely Warner's are not so afraid of the opinion of one single despised journalist that, alone of the people who have written about the Collins film on the basis of the script and my own knowledge of Collins's life that I should not be invited to the press screening? Ah well. No matter again.
I finally got to see it the other day. Insofar as Neil Jordan and the fine people in Warner's actually give a fig about what I think of the film, I have bad news for them. I think it is magnificent.
I was unable to leave the cinema at its end, so profoundly moved and saddened was I and I can understand why Neil Jordan has been so personally offended by criticism of the film in Ireland and in Britain. It is a film which shows his passionate commitment to the subject, to the film, to Ireland, and, I believe, to peace.
Many people have remarked on the fictions which occur in the film, and some of them indeed are risible. Abbreviations and contractions are inevitable in film making, but there is no excuse for having Ned Broy tortured to death in 1920 when he had another 50 years to live and I disliked the characterisations of the DMP as gun happy brutes who tortured their captives and maltreated the injured.
Of, 1916 the kicking of the injured James Connolly by a detective, and the free use of the abusive epithet "Fenian" by Catholic policemen seems to be simply plain wrong.
But how much more error have I seen in other films, and not realised it?
Possibly film makers so often engage in such fictive reductionism that they simply take for granted. And it would be wrong to judge the film purely by those errors which would only be spotted by an Irish audience, especially when each fiction has been contrived in order to convey a more generalised truth. So that though de Valera did not have a direct hand in organising the ambush in which Collins died, in a broader sense responsibility for the Civil War fell so heavily upon his actions and his decisions, that to a degree it can fairly and filmically also be said that responsibility for the details of the Civil War must fall upon his shoulders too.
And I detested too the whimsical disposal of four Northern policemen in a car bomb their deaths brought gales of laughter in the cinema where I saw the film. For this film has contemporary resonances, though Neil Jordan might not have been consciously fully aware of them and no doubt the people chuckling with such gusto beside me at the deaths of four blue nose Peelers were probably unaware of what they were doing. I can guarantee that such visceral amusement would not have been evinced if four men so murdered were members of our own Garda Siochana.
Appalled silence
But Neil Jordan does not treat other IRA killings so mirthfully, and the slaughter of the Bloody Sunday morning was performed before a, silent and appalled audience in my cinema. Nobody could doubt the true horror of such deeds and though when writing about the screenplay I derided the juxtaposition of Collins's nocturnal conversations with Kitty Kiernan through the brilliantly, brutally filmed breakfast time massacre, in filmic terms it works which possibly explains why Neil Jordan makes films and lives in Sorrento Terrace, and I write this and live in Phibsboro (where some of the film, I was happy to see, was shot).
Michael Collins is first of all a deeply powerful movie firing squad executions are so commonplace in film that only a rare and distinctive talent can convey anew what a true horror the executions of the 1916 leaders actually were, especially to someone like myself, who detests the profoundly anti democratic instincts and motives of those behind the 1916 Rising.
Neil Jordan manages this superbly. These scenes are graphic without being voyeuristic, and set a visual standard which Neil Jordan maintains throughout the film.
For Michael Collins is ravishingly shot, with so many scenes exquisitely and memorably composed, especially the two shots involving Harry Boland and Collins. The Dublin street scenes are utterly brilliant wet, grey, dirty, Dublin in the rain, Dublin in the doorways, Dublin with paupers and beggars and shining cobbles Dublin as it has never been filmed before. Real Dublin.
Man, movie, myth
All this said, Michael Collins is myth, as Michael Collins himself was myth. This film adds to the mythology, to which I do not subscribe. Quite the reverse. But I genuinely believe that nobody would be recruited for violence by this film, which ends with the despairing slide towards civil war and the enduring divisions which result from violence. Collins was consumed by the beast he helped create and it was not violence which gave the people of the Republic of Ireland their freedom, but their willpower.
But here I go, sniping at Collins again played, I should add, with humour, gravitas, passion and often brilliance by Liam Neeson. He deserves an Oscar for this quite wonderful performance.
And I was not surprised at the name of the actor given the job of playing Michael Collins's killer a fellow by the name of Myers.
Typical.