Childhood Nightmares

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Mum is going mad, Da is a drunk, and what's worse, 12-year-old Francie Brady (played by the remarkable Eamonn Owens) lives in a provincial town in Ireland in the early '60s. That means neighbors who are either dim or actively disapproving as the Bradys fall further and further into disarray. It also means that Francie's racing imagination is being fed with cultural junk food--cheap religious icons and TV purveying low-end sci-fi and images of the atomic Armageddon that everyone brooded on in those days.

"It'll be a bitter day for this town if the world comes to an end," a lady in the grocery shop sighs during the Cuban missile crisis, and that about sums up the locals' world view. But it does not begin to suggest the complexity of the movie Neil Jordan has fashioned from Patrick McCabe's novel The Butcher Boy.

It is narrated by the grownup Francie (Stephen Rea, who also plays the boy's father and Francie himself in the film's last scene) in the wryly humorous tone of a man looking back self-indulgently on a mischievous boyhood that came out all right in the end. But the personal history he recounts includes hugely destructive vandalism, arson, murder and a descent into decades of madness. The latter encompasses visions of the Virgin Mary (Sinead O'Connor, no less) appearing to him looking like a gaudy lithograph and behaving like a seductress; of priests looming up as giant science-fiction insects; and of his town's being destroyed by The Bomb, which incidentally turns all the corpses into pigs.

The contrast between the chuckly narration and the horrific scenes it plays over is brilliantly dislocating. So is the way the film slowly, gently reveals its true colors, as a tale not of amusing, forgivable youthful high jinks but of the making of a psychopath.

In the beginning, Francie is just a bright, apple-stealing, school-skipping lad, someone you can easily see as "going through a phase." But as he loses mother, father and finally his best friend (Alan Boyle), those pop cultural pictures--hard to say whether the carelessly violent or irrelevantly instructional are more damaging--fill up the empty spaces in his mind. Fill them to a kind of ghastly overflowing, which the film recounts with perverse but curiously appropriate good cheer.

Appropriate because Francie never fully realizes how this imagery has eased him across the line separating delinquency from criminality. The scariest thing about this difficult, duplicitous movie is the invincibility of Francie's ignorance on this point and the vivid gloss this offers on our unending concern about the power of crud culture to bend vulnerable minds to its heedless will.

--By Richard Schickel