A Woman's Tale

National Review, May 25, 1992 by John Simon

TWO films and both of them good; wonders will never cease. Take, first, The Playboys, co-scripted and directed by Shane Connaughton, scenarist of the remarkable My Left Foot. The story, set and shot in the village of Redhills in Eire, just south of the border with Northern Ireland, allows for a good deal of comic smuggling and, the period being 1957, just the mildest kind of IRA activity. For drama--of a sort--there is only the arrival of the Playboys, a less than mediocre company of traveling players who clumsily erect their tent on the village green.

Earlier, there was a bit of domestic excitement. Tara, the beautiful young seamstress who lives with her likewise unmarried sister, Brigid, gave birth to an illegitimate baby. The fierce exdrunkard of a village constable, Hegarty, is obsessed with Tara and wants to marry her; she doesn't love him, but cannot shake this importunate suitor. Or Father Devlin, the narrow-minded priest, consumed (like the rest of the villagers) with curiosity about the identity of the father, and insisting that she marry Hegarty, who loves her enough to ask no questions. Other men, equally unwanted by Tara, are smitten; the maniacal Hegarty sees to it that they come to no good end. Brigid has a much less complicated time of it with the village blacksmith; but, then, she is not beautiful, headstrong, and romantic.

The itinerant histrions are led by Freddie, an amiably blustering buffoon with Shakespearean delusions. The Playboys--and playgirls-are a typical bunch, including among others, one comic IRA man and a temporary juvenile lead, Tom, who seems to have spent some time in America and hopes to get back there soon. Young, handsome, and charming, he is the darling of ladies inside and outside the company, but he is barely interested until he sees Tara, and she him. Soon the atmosphere crackles with potential, then actual lovemaking; but there is also Hegarty, the love-maddened fanatic, who'll stop at nothing to stop those two.

A village youth commits suicide, not exactly over rejection by Tara, but the villagers fall into the post hoc, propter hoc fallacy, and feelings against Tara, whom Father Devlin denounces from the pulpit, run high. The worst part seems to be that she won't identify the baby's father. Someone even chalks the word "HOOR" On Tara's door, proving that local spelling is no better than local logic. But Tara is indifferent to everyone except Tom, the first man who understands and doesn't judge her. But always there's Hegarty.

The picture has the authenticity of lived life; indeed, Connaughton's father was the village policeman, and some scenes were shot in the very house where Shane grew up. Clearly much of this film is autobiographical, and luckily this Irish village has barely changed in seven lustrums. The actual villagers, especially the children, are given the function of a commenting chorus. The ludicrous performance of Othello by the Playboys is yet another comic commentary: Hegarty's jealousy grotesquely echoing the Moor's. Even the sumptuous County Cavan landscape becomes a silent commentator encouraging passion, especially as photographed by Jack Conroy in colors always on the verge of dissolving into pied, or pie-eyed, ecstasy, but always pulling .back into a semblance of sobriety.

Pulling back from the whisky, though, is at last what Hegarty can no longer manage, and in the end all Hibernian Hell breaks loose. But the subsequent happy ending feels wrong to me. To put it in Syngean terms, there is, titular similarity notwithstanding, less kinship here with The Playboy of the Western World than with Deirdre of the Sorrows, which cries out for a tragic ending. Such uncontrolled violence is afoot that I cannot quite swallow a happy conclusion, however toughly and touchingly Connaughton and his co-scenarist, Kerry Crabbe, have written it, and however compelling the acting is from first to last.

Albert Finney does for Hegarty everything possible and even the near-impossible, which is to make this dour and destructive character likable. Aidan Quinn keeps getting better as an actor: At Play in the Fields of the Lord (an interesting and rather underrated film) stretched him considerably; here, as Tom, he displays further maturity, without losing the boyishness that is his mainstay. Milo O'Shea gives a--for him--nicely restrained performance as Freddie, though to avoid all suspicion of overacting he would have to trim his trademark eyebrows, bushy enough to thatch a cottage with. The supporting cast is as aromatic as Irish character actors can get, but the real find of the movie is Robin Wright as Tara. Seen hitherto in nugatory enterprises, Miss Wright is here spunky and temperamental, yet capable of a quick shift into a rich, deeply felt feminine quietude and warmth, and is, in a word, right. Gillies MacKinnon, though Scottish, has directed idiomatically; it must be the Gaelic connection.

With his latest, A Woman's Tale, the Dutch-born Australian director Paul Cox has won me over completely. This is a rare, honest, moving but not maudlin, melancholy but not depressing film about old age, illness, and dying. Cancer here is not a tear-jerking or "artistic" element, but a simple fact of life with which you live as best you can.