My Friend Tir na nOg

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: INTO THE WEST

DIRECTOR: MIKE NEWELL

WRITER: JIM SHERIDAN

THE BOTTOM LINE: Myth and reality blend unsentimentally in a lovely, lively fairy tale about modern Ireland.

Two cute kids, their mother dead, their father sunk in despair. A splendid white horse who adopts them. Cruel adults who try to separate boys and steed. A comical-adventurous attempt by the innocents to escape their wicked -- or at least unfeeling -- oppressors.

Oh God, family fare. Well, yes and no. That is to say, you could safely bundle the brood off to Into the West and no harm would come to them. But a grownup could sneak off to it all alone and have an extremely rewarding evening. For stallion and friends are Irish, meaning that an aura of Celtic mysticism surrounds the horse and a rebellious, wandering spirit moves in eight-year-old Ossie (Ciaran Fitzgerald) and 12-year-old Tito (Ruaidhri Conroy).

They are, in fact, the adorable inheritors of a threatened Irish subculture, that of the Travellers, or Celtic Gypsies. It is their grandfather, who continues to follow the old, threatened ways, who brings the animal he calls ! Tir na nOg (Land of Eternal Youth in Gaelic) to them in the unhappy Dublin housing project where they live with their father (Gabriel Byrne), who abandoned his free-roving heritage after his wife's death.

The kids don't know much about that. But never mind. Televised westerns have filled the gap, imbuing them with the spirit of benign outlawry. They assert it first in the richly comic sequence in which they try to hide their horse from the police (who are in league with a rich man who wants to turn Tir na nOg into a champion jumper) in their tiny apartment. They maintain it as they move on into the west, where one of their refuges is, appropriately, a movie theater closed for the night. The sweetly funny improvisations of their flight through the Irish countryside all help them to resist sentimentality and symbolic schematization.

In the best sense of the word they -- and the movie -- remain wayward, unpredictable. For this, credit the blarney-proof script of Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot) and the wintry imagery and emotional firmness of the direction by Mike Newell (Enchanted April). There are no leprechauns sitting on their shoulders. Their fantasy is firmly grounded in the austere reality of modern Ireland, and that reality adds poignance to the mythic yearnings of the characters.