The General
Studio (in U.S.): Sony Pictures Classic
Length: 2 hours, 9 minutes
Director: John Boorman
Here's a trivia question for you. It's a new British film that looks at the difficulties of life in lower-class cities and features a small-time mob boss. It depends upon a charismatic acting performance from the male lead for its success. It's made by a critically-acclaimed director who's been working for 30 years. It won a major award at Cannes last year and has opened in the United States recently to favorable reviews. Can you name the movie? If you answered My Name is Joe, you're absolutely right. If you answered The General, you're also correct. Don't let the similarities fool you, though. One of these movies is an honest and challenging look at the difficulties of life in a fallen world, while the other is content to steal laughs and ride the fence.
The General , written and directed by John Boorman (Point Blank, Deliverance) is a bio-pic, a fictionalized account of a real person. In this case, the central character is Marty Cahill, the leader of a robbery ring in Dublin who was murdered in 1994. Played by Brendan Gleeson, Cahill comes across as a funny, stubborn man who loves his wife and kids, and makes his money as a thief.
The movie opens with Cahill's death and then quickly moves back to the time when he's released from jail only to find his house is being torn down. After a funny sequence where Cahill refuses to leave the site, going so far as to live in a trailer and then a tent, we get to the heart of them movie--we see Cahill rob a house. Boorman, despite the obvious affection he has for Cahill, doesn't flinch on showing us how Cahill became rich and famous.
The best scenes in the film are the confrontations between Cahill and a local cop he grew up with (played with quiet intensity by Jon Voight). Voight knows what Cahill is up to but can't prove it, so instead focuses on trying to convince Cahill to use his intelligence in more productive ways. Unfortunately, Voight is underutilized. A more interesting picture would've looked closer at the relationship between these two men and the morality each embraces. But Boorman chooses to stick with Cahill, presenting the latter years of his life in standard bio-pic fashion: hit the highlights (buying a house, robbing a huge jewelry warehouse), portray the relationships (with his wife, son, partners-in-crime, and mistress), and show why we should care.
In this case, it appears that the audience is supposed to care because Cahill, despite his obvious flaws, is a wonderfully sensitive and funny guy. He raises pigeons with his son, he truly loves his wife even though he's having an affair with her sister, and his devil-may-care attitude is hilarious. While robbing a house, he finds a toy that he realizes his son will like and, with a silly grin on his face, puts it into his bag. And it's not just Gleeson's performance that makes it funny. The way the shot is edited, with a quick jump from the burglarized house to the toy sitting on his son's dresser, almost compels the audience to chuckle.
Other scenes raise the laugh meter. There is something genuinely funny about a group of people marching under the banner "Concerned Criminals Against Drugs;" and when Cahill disrupts his various trials with weird disguises and outrageous antics, I found myself giggling. It's a hollow laughter, though-like when a little boy who's being led away to the principal sticks out his tongue. You know you're not supposed to laugh at him, but you do anyway.
There's also a great deal of humor in My Name is Joe. The protagonist, Joe Kavanagh, is an unemployed Glasgow man in his late 30s. And as anyone who knows Glasgow (or Europe, for that matter) knows, unemployed men play football (that's soccer to us Americans). But Joe just doesn't play football, he coaches the worst team in the city. A team so bad it's only had one win in its entire existence. The exploits of this team are a critical point of amusement in the movie.
My Name is Joe isn't a comedy, though. It's a fabulous portrayal of a man struggling to overcome his past of alcoholism and crime. Joe Kavanagh is one of those men that we so rarely see in movies-a fully developed and completely realistic character who's neither Superman nor Satan but rather goes through life trying to do the best he can. Most directors would be scared of letting a movie revolve around such a portrayal, but Ken Loach, the director, just lets the camera roll; and it leads to one of the better movies of the last year.
If you're going to let a movie hinge on one character, you better have an actor capable of pulling it off. Peter Mullan's powerful performance in the title role is critical to the movie's success. He presents such a natural and endearing, yet realistic, portrait of a man struggling with alcoholism that it's almost impossible not to be drawn into the film. Unlike so many other recovering alcoholics we've seen in movies, Mullan doesn't offer a great deal of histrionics or unbridled passion. Rather, he shows us the struggle in subtle ways-a gesture here, a sigh there, a low-key discussion of why he decided to stop drinking.
A sterling example occurs at the beginning of the film. Before the credits even come up, we hear Joe's voice, in a Scottish accent so thick the studio provides subtitles, telling of different alcoholics he's met. As the monologue nears its close, the screen suddenly fills up with Joe's face, a good-looking, nearing middle-age, regular joe (pardon the expression). And we realize he's not talking to us-he's speaking to an AA group-but we're hooked by his story just the same. When he concludes with "My name is Joe, and I am an alcoholic," I was ready to follow this film wherever it would go.
Thankfully, Joe's alcoholism is only one facet of his personality rather than the dominating motif. Most Hollywood versions of this story would've eliminated every other nuance of Joe's character, but Loach focuses much more on his interactions with the younger guys of his football team, the pain of being middle-aged and still on the dole, and the challenges of dating.
In fact, the first half of the movie revolves mostly around Joe's interactions with two people: Liam, a younger man who's struggling to stay clean even while his wife battles her own addiction; and Sarah, a middle-class woman who Joe meets and then starts dating. Like so much of this movie, these two relationships feel right-there's the discomfort and exhilaration of those first dates, there's the kidding around that takes place with old friends, and there's the pain when someone doesn't follow through on his word.
The naturalness of the characters is due in no small part to the tremendous actors. It bears repeating that Peter Mullan as Joe gives a world-class performance, but Louise Goodall as Sarah holds her own. Few would say she is a natural beauty but she inhabits her character with grace and compassion, and her relationship with Joe is one of those rare specimens in movies, a well-rounded love story between two middle-aged people. And David McKay as Liam presents all of the difficulties of being a young husband and father without a job.
Matching the characters' realism is Loach's portrayal of lower-class Glasgow. Every part rings true, from the small and dingy flats people live in to the way men rely on football to escape from their dismal lives. And their lives are dismal. There is little chance of finding a well-paying job, their relationships with women are often troubled by a lack of money, and the prospects of things getting better are very slim.
Loach has been criticized in the past for wearing his leftist politics on his sleeve, but here he takes a more subtle approach. He presents the story without a lot of political baggage, trusting that his portrayal of lower-class people with few options in life will be powerful enough. The documentary style of story-telling and camerawork certainly contribute to that approach. And though I'm growing tired of every British Isles movie being shot in different shades of blue and gray, the cinematography does add to the bleakness of the story.
For a good part of the movie, though, Joe looks like he might transcend his circumstances, but then events transpire against him. Liam's wife owes the local drug dealer a large sum of money, certainly too large for an unemployed husband to pay. To send a message to the community, the dealer offers to wipe out the debt in exchange for breaking Liam's legs. Joe gets wind of it and attempts to intervene with the dealer, an old acquaintance from his past. The dealer agrees, but the price is that Joe has to make a couple of trips.
The choice presented in My Name is Joe is a compelling one. Does Joe make two drug runs for a despicable drug dealer he once knew, or does Joe let Liam pay with his legs for his wife's addiction? Christians who rail against values clarification exercises in school might be even more uncomfortable with this kind of choice, but it's one that people face every day, even Christians. And it's one that divides Joe and Sarah, just as their lives are coming together. That division leads to one of the most gripping scenes in a movie filled with them, with Sarah screaming at Joe for lying to her and Joe responding, "Some of us don't have a choice. Some of us don't have a f***ing choice."
The fact that Joe has to make this choice makes the viewer hate the
mob boss even more, and that's what makes The General seem so disingenuous.
Marty Cahill also forced people into these kinds of situations, but Boorman
glosses over those and instead focuses on what a funny guy Cahill was or
how well he treated his wife and kids. Yes, the movie mentions the ramifications
of Cahill's robberies (businesses close, people are put out of work), but
the overriding focus is on his exploits and his standing with the common
man. That's not to say movies (or any other art form, for that matter)
can't portray complex characters. In fact, I'm all for showing characters
who have both profound strengths and weaknesses, for that's what life actually
looks like. But that's significantly different from inviting
an audience to laugh with a self-centered amoral character, particularly
one based on real-life. I'm not sure we should be laughing at that.
The General is certainly not without its strengths. Gleeson's lead performance is very strong, and Seamus Deasy's black-and-white cinematography is sleek and sharp. But the reliance on one character, particularly one I found so unsympathetic, made the movie fall flat for me. A stronger sense of the conflict between Cahill and the police would have made this a more complex and interesting film.
My Name for Joe, for all of its strengths, isn't a perfect movie, either. When Joe is confronted with his choice to run drugs or let Liam be beaten, the film, so sure of itself in the first half, misses a step. It shifts the movie from being a study of a man and his struggles to one more driven by plot. It's almost as if Loach and screenwriter Paul Lavert didn't trust their own judgment and instead fell back on the easy plot device. Given the strengths of this movie, however, that's a fairly small quibble. The acting is tremendous, the love story is compelling, there are some wonderfully funny moments, and Joe Kavanagh is one of the great movie characters of the last year. Those offended by a lot of swearing (and I do mean *lots* of swearing) may want to think twice about seeing My Name is Joe. That qualification aside, it's a very strong movie that presents a side of life most Americans will find eye-opening and Christians will find challenging.
By J. Robert Parks
My Name is Joe: 
The General: 
