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The Butcher Boy Dir: Neil Jordan Stars: Eamonn Ownes, Alan Boyle, Stephen Rae, Aisling O'Sullivan, Sinead O'Connor What could be funnier than a child's slow descent into murderous insanity? If you can't answer this question, you may love Nail Jordan's The Butcher Boy, perhaps the darkest comedy ever produced. The effort is certainly darker than his last three films - Mona Lisa, Interview With a Vampire, and The Crying Game. At first, The Butcher Boy seems to be a harmless celebration of childhood mischief. Twelve year old Francie Brady and his buddy Joe romp about the lush forests of Ireland, chasing unseen enemies of the Lone Ranger and hunting for the one-armed man. They steal apples from their neighbor's yard and comics from Phillip Nugent, their neighbor's son. Kid's stuff, right? Wrong. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Francie is a bully and not completely right in the head. His father's a drunk, and her mother's not all that balanced herself, so they don't notice their boy's pranks are getting more vicious. Francie sets his sights on Mrs. Nugent and Phillip, bent on making their lives a living hell for Mrs. Nugent's snobbishness towards his family. Francie declines in clear stages, from prankster to menace to dangerous psychopath, making the film seem as schizophrenic as its main character. It's not until he starts speaking with the Virgin Mary, played by Sinead O'Connor, that it clicks that the boy is truly insane. It's the end of the innocent romp, and the start of a somewhat muddled, confused middle section where the film alternates between slapstick hilarity and genuinely frightening revelations about Francie. The narration is provided by Stephen Rae, who also plays the adult Francie and Francie's drunken father. Francie talks to the narrator at times, and the narrator talks back, which can be terribly disjointing. It's not until later that it becomes clear that this wasn't a design flaw, but a device to add a bit of surrealism to the script. All of a sudden, someone pushed the big, shiny red button marked "weird" and all hell breaks loose. Cold war visions of atomic destruction fade in and out of the film, fragments of Francie's demented imagination. The whole town gets involved with his story, and the devolution is completed in one bloody act. The lasting effect is that The Butcher Boy keeps the audience at bay. There's more sympathy for the town that had to endure Francie than for Francie himself. What could have been a great film is reduced to an interesting sideshow that is too easily dismissed as a freakish black comedy. -Nick |
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