The Run of the Country. - movie reviews

National Review, Oct 23, 1995 by John Simon

Peter Yates, a decent director, has been absent too long, and is welcome back even in second-best form with The Run of the Country. The script, by Shane Connaughton, the co-adapter of the marvelous My Left Foot, is based on his own novel, and basks in that indomitable Irishry that, succulently managed, seems never to pall at all, at all.

This is the story of a tough Garda sergeant, referred to only as "Father" or "Sergeant," in a County Cavan village just south of the border with Northern Ireland. His beloved wife has just died, and he is left with a college-age son, Danny, who loves him but considers him a bully implicated in his wife's fatal heart attack. Rebelling, Danny leaves home and moves in with Prunty, a fun-loving farmer and womanizer, who hits the bottle as hard as he does a fellow roisterer's chin. It turns out, though, that there is more to him than that, and Danny learns more from him than the aphrodisiac effect on women of a clove-chewing mouth, although he learns that, too.

Father wants his son to emigrate to America, but Danny meets Annagh Leigh, a girl above his station, half Protestant and half Catholic, and they fall in blissful love. Then several kinds of hell erupt. All these people discover that they do not have the run of the country, that, in fact, it is the country that runs them. Religion, politics, and sheer bad luck have their dismal day, yet something good, too, is salvaged from the suffering. Ireland once again reveals itself as primevally violent and tragic, but always with a countervailing glint of wild humor.

And something else besides: poetry. Where else but in Ireland would you hear this from unsophisticated village lovers: "Who's your favorite poet?"

"Seamus Heaney."

Danny dissents: "He wears his heart on the sleeve."

Comes Annagh's rejoinder: "The only place to wear it." (Interesting to contrast this with Anne and Benwick's discussion in Persuasion of the relative merits of Scott and Byron.) But there is poetry also of a more basic sort: in the ardor of everyday language, the fancifulness of the banter, the whimsicality of demeanor. Colors seem keener here, contrasts starker, with the intensity of the landscape (lushly caught by Mike Southon's camera) dictating the boisterous and brutal, frolicsome and impassioned behavior of its inhabitants.

Albert Finney (Father) is English: Matt Keeslar (Danny), American. Yet both manage to be grandly Irish as they suffuse toughness with strangulated tenderness, conformity with a rebellious sense of self. Victoria Smurfit is just right as Annagh: neither pretty nor plain, but both by turns, touchingly combining the earthy with the ethereal. Best of all, however, is Anthony Brophy as Prunty, a fellow of infinite contradictions, contradictions that have no end of fun clashing in his heart and brain and mouth. His is a performance of tremendous tact in its very excess: Brophy finds a serenity at the core of vehemence. And how wonderful that even the funniest scene in the film -- where Danny, usurping priestly vestments, is obliged by a farmer to bless his pregnant sow -- ends up with an edge of sadness. Everything and everyone here is riven, but, like Tara's harp, the more fiercely plucked, the more tangily resonant.