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Breakfast on Pluto

The Columbus Dispatch

6 January 2006

By David Germain

Actor sparkles in strange yet heartbreaking drama

Who else but Neil Jordan could wring a crowd-pleaser out of the story of a cross-dressing Irish misfit frolicking among IRA bombers, police thugs, a glammed-up rockabilly band, a serial strangler, and a madman in a kiddie-park costume?

Breakfast on Pluto is a raucous, thoroughly involving successor to Jordan's The Crying Game and The Butcher Boy, which also blend wicked absurdist humor and fantasy elements with harsh and oftenbloody reality.

Cillian Murphy—hero of the zombie fest 28 Days Later..., a bad guy in Batman Begins and Red-Eye—shows what he can really do as an actor, and it's a great, great deal.

Aside from being a real looker in heels, skirt, blouse, and wig, Murphy is a whirlwind of energy, searching for both the mother who abandoned him and a place to call home.

Jordan enlists a tremendous lineup, including past collaborators such as Brendan Gleeson, Liam Neeson, and Stephen Rea in rich supporting roles.

Adapted from Patrick McCabe's novel, is a romp through the sugary pop culture and social mayhem of Ireland and England from the 1950s to the '70s. The stark conflict over Northern Ireland's independence is juxtaposed against the glam-rock scene and a nonstop soundtrack that ranges from Patti Page's How Much Is That Doggy in the Window to T-Rex's Children of the Revolution.

Mincing through the madness is Patrick Braden, an illegitimate child left at the door of Father Bernard (Neeson) in an Irish Republic town along the border of Northern Ireland in 1958.

Farmed out to a harpy (Ruth McCabe) of a foster mom, young Patrick (Conor McEvoy) grows up with a fancy for trying on his stepsister's clothes and makeup.

Murphy takes over the role as Patrick becomes a teen rebel scandalizing his school with a ribald essay about his conception. At odds with the prigs of his conservative town, Patrick takes on the name Kitten and revels in an increasingly androgynous persona as he prances through misadventures both mad and menacing.

His companions and adversaries along the way include a gentle magician (Rea); a rockabilly singer (punk rocker Gavin Friday) with a glam edge; a strangler (Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music) encountered as Patrick hustles tricks on the street; and two London cops (Ian Hart and Steven Waddington) who put poor Kitten through a pounding to elicit information on an Irish Republican Army bombing.

Gleeson is a standout as a blustering kook who earns his keep dressed as one of the bigsnouted creatures of the 1970s British children's show The Wombles.

All the while, Patrick is on the hunt for the "Phantom Lady"—his real mom, who he's told looks exactly like Mitzi Gaynor.

For all of its racy themes, Breakfast on Pluto maintains an air of innocence appropriate to Patrick's childlike demeanor. Although Patrick pairs off with male companions, the carnal nature of his liaisons remains ambiguous, and, in his naivete, he seems almost an asexual figure.

Screenwriters Jordan and McCabe—who previously collaborated on the script for The Butcher Boy, also based on a McCabe novel—craft the film in a rapid-fire succession of "chapters" that lend it the literary quality of a personal memoir.

Jordan makes grand use of a barrage of pop tunes: from Dusty Springfield to Buffalo Springfield, Bobby Goldsboro to Harry Nilsson, Morris Albert to Kris Kristofferson. Two early Van Morrison songs underscore Patrick's story especially well.

The film is longer than it needs to be yet dashes along breathlessly thanks to its dynamic structure and the larger-than-large presence of Murphy, whose performance is probably too weird and edgy to put him in the Academy Awards race but could easily put him in the running if there were a movie prize for heartbreaker of the year.