My Wild Irish Rows

Film: The Field
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on The New Portable.

I think it’s easy to think of Richard Harris as his last roles. Specifically, I’m thinking of him as Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films and as Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator. In all of these cases, Harris was staggeringly old and frail, a man who looked like he could be blown away with a stiff breeze. He was a far cry from the man he was in the 1960s in films like This Sporting Life. So where was he going to be in 1990 in The Field? Would he be the physical specimen of his early years or would he be the wizened man who could be snapped like a twig?

It’s a little bit of Column A and a little bit of Column B. Harris looks like an old man, far older than the 60 years he actually was. But once you see him move and talk, he behaves like a man half his age. This is a vibrant performance in the body of an older man, and because of it, it’s interesting. It’s also interesting in that it is Harris’s second of two nominations. His first came in 1963 and this one came a full 27 years later. Is that the biggest gap between nominations? Probably not, but it’s got to rank pretty high.

New York Stories

Films: In America
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

Jim Sheridan is a fine director. I’ve liked his movies that I’ve seen in the past, so in that respect, I was looking forward to In America. For some reason, I pegged the time frame of this movie all wrong. I knew that this was an immigrant story, but that’s really all I knew. I expect that this would be similar to most of the immigrant stories that I’d seen and that we’d be somewhere in the late 19th or early 20th century. That’s not the case, though. We’re firmly in the early 1980s with our immigrant clan coming from Ireland through Canada to New York on a visitor’s visa.

Our family consists of four people and the intense baggage of a fifth. Johnny (Paddy Considine) is an actor hoping to make it on stage in New York. Wife Sarah (Samantha Morton) is a school teacher, but can’t find work as a teacher in New York, so instead gets a job at an ice cream parlor near the family’s low-rent apartment in a building filled with addicts and drug dealers. The children are Christy (Sarah Bolger) and Ariel (Emma Bolger, Sarah’s real-life sister). The fifth member of the family is Frankie, the son who has died from a brain tumor. This fact weighs heavily on the entire family, of course, but the hardest on Johnny, who has essentially locked off his emotions so as not to deal with his son’s death.

The Guildford Four

Films: In the Name of the Father
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

There’s a weird little subgenre of films that consist of people being wrongfully accused of crimes, being arrested, and then having to fight the system to prove their own innocence. Sometimes, we get a pretty solid action movie like The Fugitive. Other times, we focus on the lawyers like in A Few Good Men. Most of them, though, are more along the lines of In the Name of the Father about the experiences, botched trial, prison sentences, and eventual exoneration of the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven. Don’t know them? Well, you probably would if you were British or especially Irish.

Back in the 1970s, Gerry Conlon (Daniel Day-Lewis) was a petty thief in Belfast, Northern Ireland. While the IRA was fighting the British Army, Gerry was stealing scrap metal for money. After a run-in with the police nearly gets him killed and almost starts a riot, his family decides that it’s time for him to get out of Belfast. His father Guiseppe (Pete Postlethwaite) and mother (Maureen McBride) send him off. On the trip, he encounters his friend Paul Hill (John Lynch) also headed to London. Once there, Gerry foregoes staying with his aunt and instead the pair moves into a hippie commune.

Christy Brown

Film: My Left Foot
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.

If there is a more dedicated actor in the business than Daniel Day-Lewis, please point him or her out to me. It has been reported that during the filming of My Left Foot, Day-Lewis refused to leave his wheelchair, required other people to feed him, and stayed in character while on set the entire time. From what I understand, this is par for the course with him. What that means to me is that I’m very happy I didn’t work on Gangs of New York or There Will Be Blood. He’s been nominated for an Oscar five times, and has won two so far. I imagine that anyone reading this in a couple of weeks will be wondering why I forgot his almost inevitable Oscar for Lincoln. Well, that’s because I’m writing this about 10 days ahead of the ceremony. I’m just guessing that he’ll win.

My Left Foot is the inspirational and somewhat true story of Christy Brown. Brown was born with severe cerebral palsy and had full control over only one part of his body: his eponymous left foot. Assumed to be mentally retarded as well as physically handicapped, it took years for Brown to get others to understand he was not merely mentally average, but bright. The film chronicles his story of learning to write (he eventually became an acclaimed novelist) and draw (as well as a noted artist), doing everything with his left foot.