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THE BUTCHER BOY
Rating:  ½
Ireland/USA. 1997.
Director – Neil Jordan, Screenplay – Neil Jordan & Patrick McCabe, Based on the Novel by Patrick McCabe, Producers – Redmond Morris & Stephen Woolley, Photography – Adrian Biddle, Music – Elliot Goldenthal, Visual Effects – Peerless Camera Co (Supervisor – Kent Houston), Special Effects – Joss Williams, Prosthetics – Animated Extras, Production Design – Anthony Pratt. Production Company – Butcher Boy Films/Geffen Pictures.
Cast:
Eamonn Owens (Francie Brady), Alan Boyle (Joe Purcell), Stephen Rea (Benny Brady/Adult Francie), Fiona Shaw (Mrs Nugent), Brendan Gleeson (Father Bubbles), Milo O’Shea (Father Sullivan), Aisling O’Sullivan (Annie Brady), Andrew Fullerton (Philip Nugent), Sinead O’Connor (Our Lady)
Plot: Growing up in Ireland in the early 1960s, young Francie Brady becomes increasingly troubled and unstable after his mother commits suicide, leaving him to be raised by his alcoholic father. Thrown into a Catholic boarding school, he has visions of the Virgin Mary appearing to him. When the self-important town socialite Mrs Nugent lures his best friend Joe away and turns him against Francie, he sees as the focus of his troubles. The alienation causes Francie to erupt in violence.
With The Butcher Boy, Neil Jordan, the highly acclaimed director of the likes of Mona Lisa (1986), The Crying Game (1992), Michael Collins (1996) and The End of the Affair (1999), took on the task of tackling Patrick McCabe’s celebrated novel about disturbed youth. Jordan (with Patrick McCabe also on script) tackle some difficult themes – The Butcher Boy is a unsettling portrait of a child in an abusive home who becomes increasingly alienated, socially ostracized and eventually locked in an asylum, before the film climaxes in a frightening explosion of violence. But despite the gravity of its thematic matter, The Butcher Boy contrarily manages to be a remarkably cheerful film. Neil Jordan directs with an enormous degree of vibrance and colour and is abetted to a tremendous extent by a wonderfully charismatic and aggressive performance from Eamonn Owens in the central role.
Indeed The Butcher Boy is possibly the most cheerful film ever made about abusive childhoods, alienation, sexual abuse, madness and murder. Just consider the point-of-view it holds, which is entirely sympathetically balanced toward the boy, where Jordan and Patrick McCabe seek to explain the mechanisms that make the climactic murder a logical act. If The Butcher Boy had been a film made in America one cannot help but think it would have been entirely balanced toward the opposite extreme. The conservative social values the character takes issue with would be unquestioningly accepted as a norm and there would have been a wholly unsympathetic and condemnatory attitude toward the boy’s actions. The scene, which is presented here with considerable glee, wherein Eamonn Owens defecates on the carpet of the self-important Mrs Nugent would have been painted in terms of the highest moral outrage. And the climactic murder would surely be seen in tones of stunned shock, asking how such could possibly happen. Indeed an American version of The Butcher Boy would surely have emerged as something akin to The Good Son (1993) or the innately evil child seen at the start of Halloween (1978).
Few audiences realize just to what a sociopathic extreme Neil Jordan does end up taking them to by making them laugh along with and enjoy the film. The whole film seems fired up by the sheer perversity of going well beyond acceptable social norms. With considerably iconoclastic delight, for instance, Jordan casts singer Sinead O’Connor, notorious for ripping up pictures of the Pope on tv, as the Virgin Mary – and predictably O’Connor’s second appearance as the Virgin is accompanied by the query “So what the fuck’s going on here?”
The Butcher Boy is not Neil Jordan’s best film, but is an immensely enjoyable one nevertheless. And it should be noted for the simple fact of being about the first film in the renaissance of Irish cinema in the 1990s not to be centered around sectarian violence.
Neil Jordan is a frequent dabbler in genre films. His other genre films include – The Company of Wolves (1984), an adaptation of one of Angela Carter’s stories that deconstructs Little Red Riding Hood with werewolves; the haunted house comedy High Spirits (1988); the vampire film Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994); the clairvoyance thriller In Dreams (1999); and the vigilante drama The Brave One (2007).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1998
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