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Film Review: Intermission
The New York Times
19 March 2004
By Elvis Mitchell
The Seamy Side of Dublin, With No Four-Leaf Clovers
The director John Crowley uses the warm rapport of ensemble acting to take the jaggedness out of the rough-and-tumble vivacity of digital-video moviemaking. A result is the dry-roasted and altogether compelling Irish comedy-drama Intermission.
The opening scene announces the film's intentions and is emblematic of its approach. Strolling into a restaurant and trilling his consonants as if he were trying to add an extra layer of moss to his accent, the roguish Lehiff (Colin Farrell) wins over the girl behind the counter, and the scene spins wildly into something else entirely. The shock—both comic and finally horrific—gives the movie the fizz of unpredictability (and in a wonderful gesture and nod to both The Third Man and Don't Look Now, a child's blithe behavior adds a grim kick). Surprise hovers over Intermission like a creature waiting to stun the cast of the movie into submission.
What Mr. Crowley and the screenwriter Mark O'Rowe have done, though, is assemble a group of actors whose feistiness prevents the doom that drips around the corners of the frame from consuming them all whole. The tangle of intersecting lives is what keeps the movie thorny and forces the actors to stay alert.
Though a bank robbery is fundamentally the center of the action, following the characters around is really what Intermission is all about. It's as if the movie serves as an intermission for Mr. Crowley from the rigid demands of plot and theme that crop up so often in his stage work. (Mr. O'Rowe, the scenarist, is also a playwright.)
Intermission, which opens today in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, is a relief of sorts for many of the actors, too. Colm Meaney almost never gets the opportunity to show the depth of his skill in American movies; his broad face and ever-ready small smile seems to rob directors in the United States of their imagination. Mr. Meaney plows through this movie as Jerry, a smirking, vile—and violent—cop who loves embellishing his own cheap mythology while crooning along to Celtic songs and torturing any miscreant unfortunate enough to step into his path. And especially if that path happens to be filmed by a reality-show producer—acting as his martial peripheral vision—pursuing him.
Another among the mélange of characters, the sniping, griping Sally (Shirley Henderson), is both angry and overly sensitive about her face. And her crankiness is made worse by a sister, Deirdre (Kelly Macdonald), so beautiful she could have stepped out of a Danny Boyle movie. The sad-eyed supermarket clerk John (Cillian Murphy) is still mooning over Deirdre; she left him to get involved with a yuppie cartoon of a bank manager. This is what motivates him to join Lehiff in the robbery—which Jerry is trying to solve.
The seamy side of Dublin on view in Intermission is also inhabited by John's oily and lazy opportunist pal, Oscar (David Wilmot), who cruises bars for middle-aged women to seduce. The needy Oscar grits his teeth as a parade of the 80s greatest hits pounds the crowds on the dance floor.
The director and screenwriter treat Intermission as a physics problem: how can this unwieldy mass of comedy, violence, cheap sex and self-pity be kept in orbit, even though its volume threatens to bring it back down to earth in a flaming heap in every single scene? The jaunty and shameless surges of comedy from Mr. O'Rowe prodded by Mr. Crowley—often cruel and angry—as well as the sheer cantankerousness of the actors provides a force that keeps this lively knockabout project from surrendering to the gravitational pull trying to snatch it down.
Intermission eventually does slam into the ground—nothing with this many different environments could stay in the lower stratosphere for so long. But even the climactic explosion of Intermission becomes part of the whole—the crashing and burning were anticipated and provide a lovely, toasty light.
