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Breakfast on Pluto
The Globe and Mail
23 December 2005
By Liam Lacey
Long journey, but it never drags
Neil Jordan's latest film, Breakfast on Pluto, is offered as a picaresque memoir of an Irish transvestite during the seventies, that era of glam rock, disco and, oh yes, IRA pub bombings.
He's a strange choice of hero, and as Kitten (Cillian Murphy) warns us, in his fluttery, digressive way, his story won't be to everyone's taste: "Not many people can take the tale of Patrick Braden, aka St. Kitten, who strutted the catwalks, face lit by a halo of flashbulbs as 'oh!' she shrieks, 'I told you, from my best side darlings.'" If that hasn't scared you off, the story of Kitten and his/her adventures among the terrorists is told with accompanying chapter titles, a bubblegum vintage-pop soundtrack (from Morris Albert's Feelings to Bobby Goldsboro's Honey) and even animated robins, cousins to the bluebirds from Disney's Cinderella. Kitten has a little incantation he recites whenever the real political world presses too close to him: "Serious, serious, serious," he murmurs dismissively.
At work here is a Candide-like story of a character determined to believe that everything will turn out for the best. As you may have heard, the performance by Cillian Murphy (a silky villain in Batman Begins and Red Eye) is terrific. Part of the reason is that he subverts expectations. Though he is slightly built and has limpid blue eyes and a cherubic mouth, Murphy isn't a particularly convincing girl. His voice strains to sound high and his movements are ungainly, but rather than distract from the performance, the clumsiness enhances it: Here is a character who, through an act of will, is determined to be beautiful and see the world the see the same way.
The setting of the story is a village close enough to the Northern Irish border to be a hotbed of Republican activity. From adolescence, Patrick/Kitten knows that the red-faced harridan who gets a cheque each month to take care of him is not his mother. He eventually learns that he is the love child of the village priest, Father Liam (Liam Neeson) and the priest's former housekeeper, the pretty blond Mitzi Gaynor look-alike (Eva Birthistle) who deposited him on the church doorstep and headed off to London.
By the time Patrick hits his teen years, he's confidently committed to his homosexuality and his fantasy life. His companions include a pretty black girl named Charlie, and two boys, the rebel Irwin, and Laurence, who has Down's syndrome. Laurence's fascination with robots leads to his early death from a bomb.
Kitten's first sense of a bigger, nobler world begins when he meets with a gang of Druid-following, dope-smoking bikers. Soon, he's on the road, performing as an Indian maiden in a glam rock band, and finally off to London to search for his mother.
In London, a new array of eccentrics waits to meet with either open arms or closed fists. Rock star Bryan Ferry makes a cameo as a sex killer. Stephen Rea is a morose magician who hypnotizes Kitten into believing he has found his mother every night on the stage. Brendan Gleason appears a theme-park character with a weakness for getting drunk and punching his employers.
Weaving in and out of Kitten's world is the recurrent presence of the Irish Republican Army—weapons caches, ruthless gunmen, and a disco bombing that ends a tender dance Kitten is enjoying with an English soldier. When Kitten is being beaten and interrogated by a ferocious English detective (Ian Hart), he spins a fanciful vision of himself as an undercover agent in Catwoman gear, annihilating his enemies with squirts of Chanel perfume. Kitten shows a talent for turning wrath to kindness. The same cop who beat him later picks Kitten up from street hooking and takes him to a job in the relative safety of a peep-show booth, which later serves as an improvised confessional.
Breakfast on Pluto is long and episodic and Kitten's coyness grows wearing, but it's a serious work about the importance of surfaces, which seems a good time to mention that the night scenes are beautifully shot in both Dublin and London by Declan Quinn. Jordan remains faithful to the looney sensibility of a hero, who is hard to take, but in his refusal to acquiesce to the social humdrum, is like a saint, or at least an artist.
