Veronica Guerin Review
by Laura Clifford (laura AT reelingreviews DOT com)October 6th, 2003
VERONICA GUERIN
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In the 1990s, Dublin was held in the thrall of the notorious Martin Cahill (Gerry O'Brien), an organized crime king known as The General, while thousands of its children became heroin addicts then forced to turn to lives of crime. As an overwhelmed police force stood by, one journalist risked verbal and physical threats, including a shooting, trying to trace the drug distribution from the bottom up. She was Veronica Guerin (Cate Blanchett, "The Lord of the Rings").
Writers Carol Doyle ("Washington Square") and Mary Agnes Donoghue ("White Oleander") take the well traveled, standard biopic route and attempt to paint Guerin as a martyred folk hero with only passing references to a journalistic style which was often criticized. Under Joel Schumacher's ("Phone Booth") direction, Blanchett gives a performance that is too breezy and her Veronica often comes across as daftly naive.
The film begins at the end, letting any audience members unfamiliar with the story know that Guerin was killed in a roadway hit after successfully getting off multiple speeding and parking ticket charges. Flashing back, we meet the brash reporter who visits a slum literally carpeted with hypodermic needles, weasels her way into police files via her detective buddy Chris (Don Wycherley, "When Brendan Met Trudy") and raps right on the Cahills' sliding glass doors from their backyard. After Cahill is killed, Guerin begins to look elsewhere for her drug source armed with a tip from Chris and her intuitive way of reading criminal contact John Traynor (Ciaran Hinds, "The Road to Perdition"). Traynor's love of celebrity flies in the face of boss John Gilligan's (Gerard McSorley, "Angela's Ashes") tactics and Traynor is warned that he will be held responsible if Gilligan's name ends up in print. Traynor hires a hit man who shoots Veronica in the leg in her home's foyer on Christmas Eve, confirming the fears of her mother Bernie (Brenda Fricker, "My Left Foot"), brother Jimmy (Paul Ronan) and husband Graham (Barry Barnes), who is also concerned for their son Cathal (Simon O'Driscoll).
Guerin reacts by visiting the city's known criminals the likes of Brian Meehan (Paudge Behan) and 'The Monk,' on crutches no less, to deliver a typed question - 'Did you have me shot?' She then tracks Gilligan to his equestrian estate, Jessbrook, strides up to his front door and rings the bell. Her explosively unexpected reception is one of the film's highlights. Asked by the police whether she wants her story or to press charges, she initially continues tracking the story, but a phone threat from Gilligan targeting her son changes her mind and seals her fate. The film's opening is repeated followed by her street-mobbed funeral procession, a coda on the arrests of the people responsible and facts regarding the reduction of crime rates thereafter.
Blanchett is a fine actress, yet her character's fate here draws little or no emotional response. She plays Guerin as someone who jumps to the next thing without completing the first, giving an impression of flightiness rather than doggedness. This is most blatant in a scene Schumacher choreographs by having Blanchett sweep into her family house, twirl while breathlessly describing her day to her husband, then waltz into the backyard where she joins a children's soccer game without missing a beat. Blanchett is most effective when she is forced to admit her fear to Graham after Gilligan's attack and subsequent phone call, the character finally humanized.
McSorley is frightening as Gilligan, hiding his criminality behind an air of quiet bad taste which can erupt with startling suddenness. Hinds has the most complex character as Traynor and keeps us guessing as to how honest his apparent liking for Veronica is. In smaller roles, O'Brien makes for a more menacing Cahill than Brendan Gleeson's charismatic turn in "The General" and Gina Costigan recalls Cara Seymour ("American Psycho") as Traynor's watchful girlfriend. Colin Farrell has a cameo as a tattooed soccer fan who makes a pass at Veronica, a bit of stunt casting which only succeeds in interrupting the flow of the film.
Schumacher paces the film well, making his points and moving on. Production design by Nathan Crowley ("Insomnia") presents varying degrees of social strata in a gray Dublin nicely filmed by Brendan Galvin ("Behind Enemy Lines").
"Veronica Guerin" needed a more conflicted heroine in order to draw an emotional response. It is merely a passable biopic which should have foregone the Hollywood model.
C+
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