Directed by Nanette Burstein. Starring Drew Barrymore, Justin Long, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Christina Applegate 15A cert, gen release, 109 min
THIS CAUTIOUSLY budgeted Irish film began life as a one-man show by the experienced actor (now film director) Conor McDermottroe. Sadly, those origins do show through from time to time. Discharging narrative salvos in half-a-dozen directions, Swansonghas the quality of a massive meta-yarn told by a somewhat unreliable saloon bar eccentric. The tales feel just a little overheated when blown up on the big screen.
Largely set in McDermottroe’s native Sligo, the film follows a local oddball, Occi Byrne, as he struggles against bullies, copes with life in a mental institution, spends time on
a trawler and makes efforts to court a local beauty. Then there is the mysterious question of his paternity. Occi’s single mum, who gave birth in London, has remained vague about the circumstances surrounding his conception.
There are more than a few problems here. The film’s sense of period is jarringly insecure. Characters appear to wear 1970s fashions, but the language sounds contemporary. The mental institution seems to exist in the 1950s, but an early Billy Idol song plays over one dramatic sequence. The tone is also (again, problems with translation from stage) far too heightened and melodramatic. This is provincial life as lived in a Patrick McCabe novel, but that writer is always careful to indicate that he knows he is trading in street-corner gothic.
Still, McDermottroe's yarn does exert a firm grip. Credit must go to the actors who breathe life into broadly drawn characters. Jodie Whittaker appears a decade older than her true age as Occi's mother. Gerard McSorley is reliably seedy as his grandfather. And Martin McCann, so good in Richard Attenborough's Closing the Ring, buzzes with cross-wired energy as the title character.
Such is the strength of McCann’s performance that one almost forgives the film its absurdly neat ending.
