Veronica Guerin Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)October 20th, 2003
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
VERONICA GUERIN
Directed by Joel Schumacher
Rated R, 92 minutes
The true story of a crusading journalist martyr is one that stabs at our collective conscience. When the hero is a brave and beautiful young woman who risked all and paid the ultimate price in order to expose scum who were peddling drugs to children, the moral ante is raised. When we know that the woman was trying to balance a dangerous and significant career with the demands of being a loving wife and mother to a young son, all the ingredients are in place for a movie that should raise our consciousness, our anger, and our tears to the flashpoint.
When the credits indicate that this package comes courtesy of the action-adventure murderer's row of producer Jerry Bruckheimer ("Pear Harbor") and director Joel Schumacher ("Batman Forever", "8MM"), it raises a flag of, if not warning, at least curiosity. It doesn't seem like a true marriage of sense and sensibilty. But we think, more power to them, and good luck. And the credits reassure us with the presence of Cate Blanchett in the title role, and a supporting cast that includes Brenda Fricker, Ciaran Hinds, and Gerard McSorley. Anticipation trumps uneasiness.
The movie is slick and solid, but its Hollywood professionalism never quite finds the pulse of the material. There's a muscular straightforwardness to the unfolding of a tale that cries out for nuance. Where is Costa-Gavras when we really need him?
Veronica Guerin was an Irish journalist who wrote and made headlines in Ireland's leading newspaper during the mid-'90s with her bold investigative reporting on the drug traffic in Dublin. She made more headlines when she was rubbed out in a drive-by assassination in 1996. The public outrage at her murder prodded citizens and reluctant public officials into a powerful campaign against the Dublin narcotics trade. According to the capsule history at the end of the movie, the country is now virtually drug-free as a result of Guerin's work and spectacular demise. She is canonized as a sort of modern-day St. Patrick, driving the snakes out of Ireland.
Most of the movie is told in flashback. In its first few minutes we see the fatal hit on Guerin as she sits in her car at a traffic light. We know she's a fast driver -- she's just come from a court date to answer for her portfolio of speeding tickets, and after receiving a genial slap on the wrist from an admiring judge, she speeds away to her encounter with mortality, weaving through traffic and talking on her cell phone.
But it is her velocity and recklessness as a journalist and a person that occupies the center of this movie, and raises its most challenging moral questions. She has been stuck on a beat for her paper that she dismisses as "church scandals and corporate corruption" when she happens on the narcotics angle, walking through slums where disposable needles litter the pavement as liberally as gum wrappers. Her eyes light up like a cleanup hitter staring at a hanging curve.
Veronica pursues her investigation with a single-minded passion. She rushes in where angels would fear to tread. She sasses cops, flirts with lowlifes, beards politicians and drug lords in their dens. She laughs at danger, thumbs her nose at intimidation, and suppresses fear. "I'm a journalist," she says. "Nobody shoots the messenger." But they do. A shot is fired into her study at home. A masked intruder shoots her in the leg. She is brutally beaten by a drug lord, who also telephones her at home to viciously threaten her family in terms that suggest he is not bluffing. She presses on down a road unmistakably signposted, refusing to alter course or tactics, with an almost jaunty fatalism.
The film plays heavily on the reversal of traditional gender roles in Guerin's family life. She and her husband have a young son, but it is he who does most of the nurturing, she who lives in the world of ego-fed adventure and forgets to buy birthday presents. As in Tarantino's "Kill Bill", characteristics like violence and family-neglecting career obsession that have been criticized as male shortcomings are beginning to feel the embrace of female empowerment.
There is an undeniable strength to this story, and to the Schumacher telling of it. Along with the button-pushing and heavy-handedness, there are moments of heart-pounding excitement, and moments of heart-rending sadness. Blanchett uses her large talent to serve us up an ambiguous character, a woman who mixes together equal parts of brains and stupidity, lack of fear and lack of judgment, charm and abrasiveness, reckoning and recklessness.
The same ground was covered a few years ago in "When the Sky Falls", a fictionalized tale of Guerin's investigative career starring Joan Allen. Guerin herself collaborated on the early drafts of its screenplay before her murder. That movie went quickly to the video shelves. This one ought to do better, with its highly visible team. Its story of uncompromising journalism and villainy exposed is one that needs to be told and seen; and its trailing themes of gender politics, responsibility, and the risks and rewards of serving the public's right to know, are topics that will stand a lot of discussion. 189 journalists, the end credits tell us, have died in the line of duty in the six years between the death of Guerin and the completion of this film.
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