 | halfbloodprincess78 |
| | Ho ritrovato alcune recensioni: Qui le traduzioni delle recensioni MICHAEL COLLINS ACTION OUSTS POLITICS IN NEIL JORDAN'S EPIC By Geoff Brown
(The Times, November 7, 1996)
Geoff Brownadmires an all-action Michael Collins Given his credentials as the martyred hero of Irish republicanism and a founding father of guerrilla warfare, no film about Michael Collins could slip out unnoticed. Least of all could this happen to a film bankrolled by Warner Bros, directed by Neil Jordan and pushed at the world market.
In Michael Collins Liam Neeson bestrides the screen as the man known as "the Big Fella", striding down Dublin streets, charisma unfurled, coat-tails flying. In the shadows is Julia Roberts, Hollywood's pretty woman, available whenever the hero needs a break from strategy, gathering intelligence or shooting the British in their homes. The action alone transfixes the eye: gunfire, explosions, an armoured car invading a football stadium, strafing the crowd. No matter what your allegiance, or the current state of Anglo-Irish relations, this is a film that demands you take notice.
But what kind of notice? Although Jordan's script never seriously deforms the facts as it tracks Collins's progress from the Easter uprising of 1916 to his death in an ambush six years later, the film never spends much time explaining the political issues to a general audience. After the briefest of opening screeds backtracking through Irish history, Jordan hits us with shells and crumbling masonry, as the fledgeling army o the Irish Republic is shot down by the British in 1916. So it goes on, with as much exemplary physical action as an old-fashioned Hollywood adventure, superbly shot by cameraman Chris Menges, and cut to the quick.
Not that Neeson's Collins exactly fits the pigeonhole of an idealised adventure hero. He is allowed to be ruthless as he plots assassinations; he is allowed to be naive. But by making such a point of the man's dynamism, the hurtling speed of his walk and talk, the film certainly paints Collins in worshipful colours. His opposite number is Alan Rickman's Eamon de Valera, the nationalists' leader, dry and deliberate even when he escapes from jail dressed as a woman. For all Neeson's gusto, Rickman is the one you watch in their joint scenes; Stephen Rea is equally powerful as the police informer in the bowels of Dublin Castle. As for Julia Roberts, cast as Collins's lover Kitty Kiernan, she serves a plot purpose early on, then gets in the way by still appearing when she does not.
Roberts's continued presence points up the film's frustrated ambitions. Irish history is too complex, and for many audiences too remote, to be streamlined into a Hollywood action epic; and by putting so much stress on the physical action, the tit-for-tat atrocities of the British and Irish forces, Jordan gives ammunition to those eager for any sign of bias. Clearer heads should appreciate the film for its imperfect but heartfelt portrayal of a man and a movement lifted by passion, but brought low by terrorism.[]
IRISH HISTORY THROUGH A HAZE
By Lloyd Rose
(Washington Post, October 25 1996)
The smoke of battle keeps blowing across the movie frame in "Michael Collins," obscuring the war-scarred streets of Dublin, along with a chunk of Irish history. Neil Jordan's epic film about the bloody events of 1916-1922 is stirring, romantic, mythical -- an aesthetic and poetic success. But for anyone not familiar with the dauntingly complicated events of the period, it's historically opaque. Without being mannered, the film is extraordinarily beautiful. Though there are many sunlit scenes, the smoky conflicts, foggy nighttime streets and country morning mists give "Michael Collins" something of the quality of a dream: the nightmare of Irish history from which James Joyce so famously said he was trying to awake.
During one scene, Collins and a friend are hiding on a roof as ashes from a burning building drift down like some dreadful snow. When a prisoner is brought into Dublin Castle, the site of the occupiers' government, the frightened turncoat Broy (Stephen Rea, in the film's best performance) follows the prisoner and his guards through a dim maze of corridors and foresees his own end. The moody authority of the directing in these and other sequences is undeniable. But the political beliefs of the characters -- the reasons they wage near-fratricidal war on one another -- are so meagerly defined that, for all its virtues, "Michael Collins" ends up adopting the shallow vision of a mediocre Hollywood bio-pic: history as a melodramatic clash of personalities.
Liam Neeson, who plays Collins, has a big, heroic presence that's right for the role. Collins, the Irish revolutionary who negotiated a peace treaty with England and died for his pains, was the stuff of which folk heroes are made. He was big and good-looking, a fierce, passionate man whose plain-spokenness hid a subtle, brilliant military mind. The movie gives the impression that Collins brought the English to their knees almost single-handedly. This is stretching things, but he was indisputably a guerrilla warrior, organizer and administrator of genius.
Unfortunately for Collins, his chief rival was a political manipulator of genius. This was Eamon De Valera (Alan Rickman), one of the more complex figures of 20th-century history. A fascinating mixture of cunning and idealism, physical courage and rotten nerves, De Valera was to die in bed in 1975, age 91, having wielded power in Ireland longer than Mao did in China. He outlived the martyred Collins - whom some charged he had killed - by 60 years.
Even fiction could hardly provide two more perfect antagonists: Collins the warm, lusty, spontaneous warrior who would visit De Valera's family and play with his children when the latter was abroad or on the run; and De Valera, the half-Spanish, half-blind ex-mathematics professor who calculated every move down to the decimal place. (He was so cool-natured that when, in 1916, an English officer came to his prison cell to inform him that he would not be executed after all, he never even looked up from his volume of St. Augustine.)
But what reality has joined together, Jordan has put asunder. Rickman plays De Valera with sinuous intelligence and his usual magnetism (and looks startlingly like him), but the part is so underwritten that the character is a cipher. De Valera comes to occupy a secondary place in the story, and the central relationship we're supposed to follow and care about is between Collins and his close friend Harry Boland (Aidan Quinn).
It's not true that British actors are always more charismatic than Americans. It's just true that Neeson, Rickman, Rea, Ian Hart (as Collins's doggedly loyal friend Joe O'Reilly) and Charles Dance (as the iciest, most evil of all Icy Evil Englishmen) are all more charismatic than Quinn. Their roles may be thinly written, but they fill them up with presence and style, and Quinn is blown off the screen by the high wind of their performances.
He always seems to be scrambling around after some other character, looking bewildered. It doesn't help that his big fallout with Collins is never explained: He just pops up one day on De Valera's side. Since that side has never been defined for the audience, we have no idea why the two former friends become enemies. (Of the other American in the cast, Julia Roberts, who as Collins's beloved keeps popping up in one gorgeous '20s outfit after another, the less said the better.)
At first, with Collins advocating guerrilla war and De Valera insisting on getting Ireland recognized as a political entity - a republic - it seems as if we're being presented with the Man of Action vs. the Man of Caution. Then, midway through the movie, Collins negotiates a peace treaty and De Valera, apparently in a fit of pique, stages a walkout from the Dail (the Irish Parliament) and starts a civil war. Now he looks like the extremist and Collins the cautious one. Without understanding more how they differed on tactics and philosophy, the audience is left with the impression that, for some incomprehensible reason, the two men switched sides.
Jordan has seen and learned from all the right movies, which in this case most notably include the "Godfather" films. Though Jordan has Coppola's romanticism and sense of scope, he fatally lacks that director's dramatic sense and rigorous moral acuity. "Michael Collins" treats controversial events that still reverberate in Irish society as if they could be explained in terms of heroes and villains, and then obscures exactly what Jordan believes heroism and villainy consist of.
Does he seriously think that De Valera, who argued that Ireland would never be accepted in the international community as long as it was run by a secret militia, didn't have a point? Or that Collins, the undercover man par excellence, might not have had problems as the leader of a conventional, open government? He doesn't tell us. Questions this complicated don't even come up. An artist has a right to any vision of history he wants - but it shouldn't be a clouded one.[]
MICHAEL WHO? IRISH FREEDOM FIGHTER AND 'BIG FELLA' By Janet Maslin
(New York Times, October 11, 1996)
Michael Collins
Like the Irish freedom fighter and statesman at the heart of his sweeping new film, the writer and director Neil Jordan faces an uphill battle.
Michael Collins, legendary in Ireland and less so in England, is largely a little-known figure to the audiences who made Jordan's two most recent films, "The Crying Game" and "Interview With the Vampire," such runaway hits.
More problematic is the elusive nature of a leader who experienced a sea change during his brief career, evolving from a pioneer of modern-day terrorism into a proponent of compromise and peace.
Serious salesmanship is in order for "Michael Collins," on and off the screen. The film itself works eagerly to emphasize the frankly entertaining aspects of its story. Picturesque romance, virtuoso cinematography and sloganeering dialogue ("I hate them for making hate necessary!") all threaten to turn "Michael Collins" into Jordan's least daringly idiosyncratic effort.
But his passionate enthusiasm for his subject survives this film's sugarcoating.
Played with great magnetism and triumphant bluster by Liam Neeson, the film's Michael Collins easily lives up to his nickname. "The big fella," as he is sometimes called here, thunders through Ireland on a mission that Jordan describes unflinchingly: to fight by any means necessary against English occupation.
"We won't play by the rules, Harry," Collins tells Harry Boland (Aidan Quinn), his close friend and associate among the Irish Volunteers, the secret force organized after the Easter Uprising of 1916. "We'll make our own."
Beautifully shot by Chris Menges with strong visual drama and a sense of moody grandeur, "Michael Collins" makes Dublin the stately backdrop for its mounting acts of sabotage. Without pulling punches about his sympathies, which are entirely with Collins and the Volunteers, Jordan imbues the film with wrenching intimations of tragedy in the making. "You will have to do the shooting," Collins tells his men, as history moves them toward bloodshed. "Don't expect it to be pleasant."
In a film that unabashedly invokes religious imagery in a political context, one fighter is seen praying in church just before a deadly attack.
While the film vividly depicts cloak-and-dagger details of the Volunteers' fight against English spies and officials in Ireland, it also tries to leaven these bloody episodes with the hokum of a love triangle.
Michael and Harry are both smitten with the fetching Kitty Kiernan, played by Julia Roberts, who in her first scene here sweetly sings an Irish standard. ("She's a voice like an angel!" Collins exclaims.) Ms. Roberts beams charmingly through this role without adding anything substantial to the film's vision of its hero.
"Promise me something, Kitty," Collins tells her in venerable leading-man fashion. "Promise you'll never care about me." At another point in this early screenplay of Jordan's, which has far less edge than his recent writing, Collins and Boland discuss the short but glorious life of a butterfly.
Like T.E. Lawrence at the same stage in British history, Collins is remembered for having invented formidable new ways to bend the will of the Empire and then weathering a change of heart later on.
"Lawrence of Arabia" is one model for the biographical film equally comfortable in the public and private arenas of its hero's life, but "Michael Collins" winds up with a private soap opera and a sometimes detached view of the political events to which he contributed.
In this realm, Alan Rickman plays the prim Eamon de Valera as a chilling counterpoint to Neeson's robust, roaringly good performance as Collins. In a small but vital role, Stephen Rea stands out as a pivotal character stirred by patriotism and by Collins's fiery and charismatic advocacy of his cause. []
Edited by Arwen68 - 7/7/2022, 18:54 | | | |
| |
|
