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Breakfast on Pluto and High School Musical
Seattle Weekly
14 June 2006
By Kate Silver
Glam rock, Irish politics, and wholesome family fun.
Neil Jordan's fantastical adaptation of the Patrick McCabe novel is, explains the director on his commentary, not your standard dour Irish film. True, you won't find talking birds or Daniel Day Lewis in platform shoes and lipstick in The Field. Instead, with his glittery heels trouncing through the mud, we have Patrick/Patricia "Kitten" Braden (Cillian Murphy, also on the commentary). He flees Ireland to escape IRA gunrunners and search for his absent mother in London. There, in a kicker straight out of The Alchemist, he rediscovers his priest father (Liam Neeson) and—wait for it—himself.
Like Kitten's cheap brassiere, there isn't much holding up this DVD. Among the extras are a nine-minute featurette and the commentary, which illuminates Jordan's meta-storytelling style. This includes employing a pair of robins to narrate the fablelike twists, and Kitten's burlesque imagining of his own conception, patterned after radio serials of the '50s. Jordan additionally explains how Kitten's pansexuality is also a rebellion against the harsh Catholic Church, and offers his definition of childhood: "a paradise from which you'll never recover."
Breakfast is most enjoyable for its sprightly glam and bubblegum pop soundtrack (including the Rubettes' "Sugar Baby Love" and Middle of the Road's "Chirpy, Chirpy, Cheep, Cheep"). Jordan has Wes Anderson's knack for choosing music that speaks and stands in for character. While Bowie was deemed too mature a voice for Kitten's naïveté, Harry Nilsson was a revelation—his falsetto felt like "finding an alternative version of the Beatles," per Jordan. As for the title, which seems plucked from the mane of Marc Bolan's unicorn, it refers to an obscurity by actor-songwriter Don Partridge. Says Jordan, "It means nothing and everything at the same time in that strange, stoned-out '60s hippie-ish way."
