Site Presented By
Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Neil Jordan explains why his psychedelic new film, "Breakfast on Pluto," about an Irish transvestite, is nothing like his hit "The Crying Game."
Nov 17, 2005 | Neil Jordan isn't the easiest interview subject in the world. During the course of our half-hour conversation in a darkened Manhattan hotel room, the fireplug-stocky, 55-year-old Irish filmmaker paces uneasily around, removes his black leather blazer and then puts it back on, fidgets with his half-full cup of milky tea (sipping from it only once) and sometimes murmurs his quiet, rapid-fire replies through an open hand or closed fist.
He agrees with things I say to him, then turns around and disagrees with them. He politely but firmly notices when I've made a pronouncement of my own, rather than asking a question. In discussing his new film "Breakfast on Pluto," a peculiar, picaresque tale about the adventures of a small-town Irish transvestite who becomes caught up in the 1970s dramas of terrorism, nationalism and self-discovery, he's prone to unhelpful and sometimes evasive comments. He'll respond to questions with cryptic utterances like, "Well, that's the character, isn't it?" Or, "Well, that's what the story was, really."
Despite the national reputation for loquacity, there's something distinctively Irish about this. Although they're great talkers on politics, religion, horse racing, football and other realms of abstract philosophical inquiry, the Irish are reticent when it comes to anything personal, and perhaps especially when it comes to something simultaneously as personal and as grandiose as artistic ambition. Best known for his startling 1992 love story "The Crying Game" and his lavish 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice's "Interview With the Vampire," Jordan is by far the most important living Irish filmmaker, with a long and varied career on both sides of the Atlantic. But he seems at great pains to avoid being seen as pretentious, to steer away from grand declarations about art or the movies or much of anything else.
In fact, for someone whose films display a taste for the grotesque and for sexual exoticism, Jordan seems eager to be perceived as a technician or craftsman, rather than an artist. Even in the relatively liberated Ireland of the 2000s, it may be beneficial to be seen that way, rather than as a twice-married heterosexual filmmaker (with five children) who for reasons of his own seeks out willfully perverse and challenging material.
"Breakfast on Pluto" is an oddly kaleidoscopic movie that may cram too much material, too many changes in setting and dramatic plot shifts, into its 135 minutes. Nonetheless it's an exhilarating work, featuring an extraordinary performance by Cillian Murphy as Patrick "Kitten" Braden, the cocksure kid who constructs a faux-naive drag persona that allows him to survive a brutal small-town childhood, the terrorist (and counterterrorist) violence of the Irish "Troubles" of the '60s and '70s, and a litany of exploiters, abusers, would-be murderers and other specters after he escapes to London.
As Jordan explains it, Patrick has to create Kitten from the resources he has at hand, mostly old Hollywood movies and English magazines aimed at teenage girls. If gay culture had begun to develop its own performative codes in places like New York and San Francisco, they hadn't reached towns like Kitten's, on the remote border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, where IRA "hard men" staged ruthless killings and bombings, and the two governments involved clamped down in return. And as Jordan also observes, as peculiar as Patrick's created persona is, he also makes for a strikingly beautiful androgyne, neither masculine nor entirely feminine. Kitten can seem hard to take at first, but stick with him/her -- he's an extraordinary character who survives a cruel environment without surrendering his autonomy of spirit. Betrayed and mistreated by a whole range of characters, including an IRA-supporting rockabilly musician who becomes his lover (played by real-life Irish cult musician Gavin Friday), a lugubrious English magician (Stephen Rea), a British cop (Ian Hart) who takes him for an IRA bomber, and a suave but sinister late-night pickup (rock god Bryan Ferry), Patrick remains innocent and hopeful, firmly committed to the vision of life and love expressed in Bobby Goldsboro's cheeseball 1968 single "Honey."
Based on a novel by the supremely underrated Irish writer Patrick McCabe (as was Jordan's 1998 film "The Butcher Boy"), "Breakfast on Pluto" has obvious points of connection to "The Crying Game," the work that for better or worse has defined Jordan's entire career. Even if these are superficial questions of theme rather than profound linkages -- as Jordan explains, Patrick is never trying to fool anyone into believing he's a woman -- they reflect the filmmaker's abiding interest in "monsters," in the oddballs, eccentrics and fringe personalities that had to find a way out of a priest-ridden, backward society like rural '70s Ireland.
In crashing from hilarity to horror and back again, "Breakfast on Pluto" also features Liam Neeson as the small-town priest who is Patrick's unacknowledged father (for my money, it's one of Neeson's most enjoyable roles), a cameo by Brendan Gleeson as a "Womble," which will seem utterly mysterious to anyone unfamiliar with British pop culture of the period, and brief appearances by two animated (or perhaps animatronic) robins, who actually seem to be the film's narrators. Like all of Jordan's movies, it has an awesome, period-specific soundtrack -- Goldsboro's song is only one element, I promise -- and a streak of bravery and profundity Jordan doesn't quite want to talk about.
Despite his prickliness and the occasionally begrudging quality of his responses, I quite enjoyed talking to Jordan, who reminds me in a general way of my own middle-class Irish relatives. Eventually, I figure out that I have to ask him a question and then shut up and let him convince himself to answer it. Notice that when I ask whether he misses anything about Ireland in the '70s, he first says no, nothing at all. By the time he has finished talking, he has gotten around to saying that the landscape is being destroyed, the rural folk traditions are dying and the Irish imagination has been damaged, but no, he still doesn't miss it. Of such paradoxes is Neil Jordan made.
I don't know if I'm misreading this movie completely, but it seems to me like a history of the recent Irish "Troubles," told in your eccentric fashion, through the lens of this particular individual in this particular place.
That's what it is, basically, yeah. From a perspective none of us had at the time. It is the Troubles, obviously. But it's also the story of the provincial going to the big town, going into the big world. The story of a boy who's been told lies about his parentage and tries to reconstruct his family. Here's one thing it's not: It's not about coming of age or about loss of innocence or about discovering your sexuality. That was one of the reasons I wanted to make it. I loved the way the character just has no question about sexual issues, from the word go. I found that very refreshing, you know? You didn't have these moments where he realizes what his sexual attractions are; you know that kind of thing? Straight off, he knew who he was for sure.
So it's not a story of loss of innocence; it's a story of him maintaining his innocence. He constructs his persona precisely so he can remain innocent while the world is trying to abuse him, smash him down, break his spirit.
