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Breakfast on Pluto
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
6 January 2006
By Joe Williams
We live in an ironic age, and any time a movie starts with some variation of "Once upon a time," we know it's really a story about storytelling. For an Irish foundling named Patrick Braden (Cillian Murphy), make-believe not only supplies him with a personal identity, it shields him from the troubles that divide his country.
Delightfully inventive and irresistibly poignant, Breakfast on Pluto opens in the '70s with a voice-over narration and chapter titles that are a throwback to 18th-century novels like Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy. As Patrick recounts how he transformed himself from an infant deposited on a church doorstep to a doggedly confident cross-dresser named Kitten, his story is filtered through multiple levels of make-believe, from the gossipy robins who witness his abandonment to the scandalous school essay where he imagines his mother looked like the actress Mitzi Gaynor to the schoolyard fantasy where his fellow outcasts defuse a bomb.
Kitten's only friends are a mixed-race girl, a boy with Down's syndrome, and a lad whose handicap is that he cares too much about the Northern Irish rebellion. Kitten's rebellion is his steadfast acceptance of his gender identity and his refusal to be bound by anything "serious."
As soon as he is able, Kitten hitches a ride out of town. For a while he sings backup vocals for a rock band and plays dress-up with the macho lead singer, Billy (Gavin Friday). But when Billy uses their trailer to store guns for the IRA, Kitten flees to London to find his mother.
Like a modern-day Candide, Kitten breezes through a low-rent life in the big city, first as a costumed character at a theme park and then as a magician's assistant. Director Neil Jordan's slyest joke is that the kindly magician (Stephen Rea) doesn't care that Kitten is a man, whereas the same actor was famously appalled by a transvestite in Jordan's The Crying Game.
Breakfast on Pluto is the stubbornly sunny flip side of The Crying Game, and even the most abrupt intrusions of reality—a near strangulation, a terrorist bombing—don't surprise or disturb Kitten as much as they do us. Although it would be easy to mistake Kitten for insubstantial, his bell bottoms and silk shirts are his protective armor. As inhabited by the impossibly pretty and blue-eyed Cillian Murphy, the tender-hearted Kitten is as fearlessly queer as the high-heeled glam-rockers who dominate the movie's soundtrack.
Be forewarned that a recurring motif is Bobby Goldsboro's bathetic "Honey," which echoes Kitten's yearning for a real home. But as in the cheery title track, home is a place so far away that he has to steer by the light of his dreams.
