Maria Doyle Kennedy, Brendan Gleeson and Angeline Ball in "The General."

MOVIE INFORMATION

With 10 as a must-see, we give this film a: Stars: Brendan Gleeson, Maria Doyle Kennedy and Adrian Dunbar Director: John Boorman Rated: R, for profanity Length: 129 minutes

ROCHESTERCRITIQUE

Having seen this film, how would you rate it? 10 5 9 4 8 3 7 2 6 1

By Eleanor O'Sullivan
Gannett News Service

(April 2, 1999) -- English-born John Boorman, who had the guts to make a valentine to World War II Hope and Glory (1987) now walks the tricky line between cautioning against and celebrating a lawbreaker with his new movie, The General.

Dublin gang leader Martin Cahill, who was shot to death in 1994, maybe by an IRA operative or maybe by a police-hired assassin, is the nebulous hero of The General. Cahill was a thief and nihilist since childhood. In early scenes drawn from his youth, the young Cahill sniffs at authority and its rules; he's a blond, blue-eyed public menace, but he's charming.

The grown Cahill is balding, pudgy-faced and overweight (unglamorous Brendan Gleeson is Cahill) but he's a charismatic winner among his thieving pals and devoted wife, Frances (Maria Doyle Kennedy). His pals call him General. In a quiet moment over tea in their 80,000-pound Dublin home bought with proceeds from a jewelry heist, Frances reminds Martin that he's a prince among men: He doesn't drink, smoke or philander.

But police inspector Ned Kenny (Jon Voight, struggling with an Irish accent) takes an opposing view: "Man of the people! Hah!!" Kenny is right. After Cahill and his goons rob O'Connor Wholesale Jewelers, it closes, putting about 100 employees out of work. Cahill retorts: "They can go on the dole."

In other words, the system stinks, except when the system provides income for the unemployed, including robbery-rich Cahill. In what is supposed to be an amusing moment, Cahill is insulted when he learns, on a TV news report, that the government has suspended his unemployment insurance.

Is this movie for real? The problem I have with The General is that it only feigns interest in how Cahill's lawlessness affects the larger social picture. He is presented in a vacuum, surrounded by Clouseau-clumsy police who watch his house day and night, and his family and gang, period.

We learn nothing meaningful of his past, his upbringing, or the forces that turned him into a lawbreaker. Does he rob for kicks? Is he merely lazy? Boorman's script has us believe Cahill is a super bright man, always one step ahead of the law and always capable of masterminding still another dazzling holdup.

As Gleeson plays him, Cahill is a jolly man never without a wisecrack or pithy observation. Real life doesn't seem to impinge on him; even when he is captured and roughed-up by police, Cahill seems to float above setbacks.

He has an inscrutable smile that he wears right down to the last moments of his life, as he stares at his approaching assassin. Ha ha, he seems to be saying; nothing you can do can change my inner life. So what.

Boorman, whose screenplay has an uncomfortable amount of cliches -- "It's still us against them," "There's nothing as low as robbing a robber" -- seems to admire Cahill for his resistance to the status quo. He's one of those pure mavericks, like our western movie heroes or lunky Arnold Schwarzenegger in his futuristic flicks, a man immune to the vagaries of the passing scene.

I think Boorman and Gleeson are trying to sell us the cliche that the Irish are merry, blithe souls whose wit and charm transcend the everyday banality of life, even a life of crime. This conceit is about 45 years past its prime. It worked in the wonderful postwar films that made stars out of Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers, but those films were outright comedies; The General is a tragedy with a smirk on its face.