Sir, - It is rare that I take up the cudgels against your film critic Michael Dwyer. Indeed, I described him as "esteemed" in a recent letter to The Irish Times (unpublished, you brutes!). However, in last Friday's paper he described the Irish film Sweety Barrett in glowing terms as an "auspicious debut" for writer-director Stephen Bradley. On the strength of Mr Dwyer's encomium I volunteered two hours of my time to go and see it.
I couldn't disagree more with your critic. This film is utter tosh and is not redeemed by Brendan Gleeson's expressive central performance as an idiot sort of Forrest O' Gump. The film's only success is in the dubious honour of making the grimy town of Balbriggan look even seedier and more inhospitable than usual, if that's possible.
Gleeson is good. But the material he is working with is shallow, impoverished and predictable. It's difficult to know if Sweety Barrett is meant to be a comedy, tragedy, whimsy or whatever. Its spiritless script failed to raise a single laugh among the audience. Its climactic moment of anguished distress raised a mere frisson of apathy and most of the 14 people who were there at the start of the film had left before the embarrassingly hammy denouement.
It is reckoned that in the average human life a person will use up about 800 million heartbeats before the heart wears out. Never mind getting my money back. Who can give me back the 8,400 heartbeats I used up watching this piece of sub-urban drivel? - Yours, etc., David Fay,
Leix Road, Cabra, Dublin 7.