This Is My Father Review
by "Harvey S. Karten" (film_critic AT compuserve DOT com)January 14th, 1999
THIS IS MY FATHER
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D.
Sony Pictures Classics
Director: Paul Quinn
Writer: Paul Quinn
Cast: Aidan Quinn, Declan Quinn, James Caan, Jacob Tierney, Colm Meaney, Moira Deady, Moya Farrelly, Gina Moxley, Stephen Rea
With the rise of ethnic cheerleading over the past decade or so, it has become fashionable to know "who you are," whether that means finding out more about your racial, religious, ethnic or national group or, in the case of people who are adopted to find out the identities of their real parents. Somehow, the theory goes, you cannot be a complete person if you are not centered in all of these ways: you will be plagued throughout your life, rudderless and adrift, unless you can settle up on your singularity. I don't buy this, but I don't bury my head in the sand. This is the current reality and is probably the basis for Paul Quinn's intriguing film, "This is My Father." The picture moves forward at a snail's pace, perhaps because plot takes a distant second to character, though despite its lingering pace, the film never becomes truly languid. Featuring some major stars and introducing a fetching new personality, Moya Farrelly, "This is My Father" tells the story of a man who is a burnt-out high-school teacher, not married, who seems to spend considerable time with his sister, his nephew, and his stroke- ridden mother in a Chicago suburb. Paul Quinn, its writer and director, takes us from a present-day American scene to the Emerald Isle as Kieran Johnson (James Caan), having accidentally discovered a sixty-year-old letter written by a father he never knew to his mother, suddenly determines to go to his ancestral home in Ireland to find out more about his heritage.
What Kieran finds when travels to his dad's old home village with his rebellious, adolescent nephew Jack (Jacob Tierney), is more than he bargained for. A village being a village, Kieran has little trouble finding an elderly woman in the bed-and-breakfast place he settles into, Mrs. Kearney (Moira Deady), who knows all about Kieran's dad. As young Jack forms a friendship with two local girls his own age, a rapport which will revitalize his own life, Kieran listens over several days to Mrs. Kearney's tale while Seamus (Colm Meaney), the owner of the B&B and Mrs. Kearney's son, collects a storyteller's fee of twenty Irish pounds.
Director Quinn takes us back to the late thirties, a time that Mrs. Kearney believes was better because then you rarely heard about murders. But in describing the characters of the town, people who were anything but the almost unanimously cordial folks in Kirk Jones's picture "Waking Ned Devine," we wonder whether the village Ireland of 1939 could be described as a pleasant place to take root. Its characters include a frustrated Widow Flynn (Gina Moxley); a happy-go- lucky girl liberated in a traditional society, Fiona (Moya Farrelly); an ornery malcontent, Mrs. Madigan (Sheila Flitton) who is to put a curse on Widow Flynn; and an assortment of people who are terrorized by the hellfire sermons of the two priests, Father Mooney (Eamonn Morrisey) and Father Quinn (Stephen Rea). While the town has at least two fine folks who take in a poor orphan lad and put him to work on their farm, the hamlet houses anything but those dear hearts and gentle people often portrayed by the drawings of Norman Rockwell. The core of the story is the relationship of Kieran O'Day (Aidan Quinn), who is Kieran Johnson's long lost father, and the former's underage girl friend, Fiona Flynn (Moya Farrelly). Because Kieran is a poor orphan many years older than Fiona and from a different social class, their relationship does not enjoy the town's or the Church's approbation. Much of the humor of the story lies in writer-director Quinn's obligatory ribbing of the Catholic Church, with the unforgiving Fathers Mooney and Quinn who rail against "fornication" and warn sinners of the eternal fires that await them.
"This is My Father" carries some of the baggage usually conveyed in stories of rural Ireland. By way of comparison, Jim Kelley, the good-news lottery official of Kirk Jones' "Waking Ned Devine" could be compared with the brash American pilot-photographer, Eddie Sharp (John Cusack), who transports his vivacious personality to Fiona and Kieran, while the grouchy and vindictive Widow Flynn and Mrs. Madigan could be equated with that movie's spoilsport, Lizzy Quinn. The town doctor, John Maney (Donal Donnelly) is motivated by other than money when making housecalls on Widow Flynn, and the town's brawling lads have similar lust on their minds when they cut in on Kieran's dance-hall date, Fiona.
"This is My Father" interweaves a comic light spirit with melancholy and ultimate tragedy so seamlessly that we scarcely are aware of when one genre ends and the other takes root. We leave the two-hour sketch with a better understanding of why so many people left their home countries (in this case rural Ireland) for American shores--to escape religious harassment, clannish envy, and a feudal- style backwardness. This is a small, gentle movie with sincere, heartfelt acting that will reinforce the stereotypical belief that the Irish are the world's eminent storytellers.
Rated R. Running Time: 120 minutes. (C) 1999
Harvey Karten
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