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For years, the joke was that Ireland’s greatest export was its youth. Before the heady prosperity of the Celtic Tiger years, young Irish fled in droves for economic opportunity abroad. Many embarked for neighboring Great Britain, where a ferry ride of a few hours left open the possibility of an easy return home. Such a hopeful journey, and its bitter end, is the subject of Tom Collins’ melancholy drama Kings.
In 1977, a group of Irish lads leave for London, vowing to find their fortune and return home to acclaim. They find low-level work in the construction trade, and hunker down in the immigrant neighborhood of Kilburn. Thirty years later, when Kings opens, the men re-unite to finally send one of the gang back to Ireland — “young Jackie,” whose broken middle-aged body is going home in a casket.
Collins adapted his film from Jimmy Murphy’s play (the more sardonically titled The Kings of the Kilburn High Road). Thus, despite its occasional flashbacks, street scenes and jumpy handheld camerawork, the story grows increasingly stagebound as the men gather for Jackie’s wake, itself a sad affair held in the disused backroom of a former Irish pub. Kings lightly sketches the half-dozen men, focusing on two unemployed, alcoholic roommates — angry Jap (Donal O’Kelly) and desperately sad Git (Brendan Conroy) — and their former mate, Joe (Colm Meaney), the one who struck it rich. As the booze flows, recriminations fly, dark secrets are revealed and achievements (or not) are tallied.
It’s well-acted, if familiar turf. You won’t be surprised to learn the men have abandoned their adolescent dreams for a variety of not-so-great compromises, in part because that’s how life goes, but also because they set sail at the wrong time. In Kings‘ more insightful moments, many of them throwaways, Collins depicts the collapse of Irish immigrant communities (now replaced with more recent immigrant populations), which leaves these men adrift. Nor can they return home, now that Ireland is a modern success story and they are failures from a distant past. This is poignant stuff — these men of no place — but I cringed when Collins felt the need to have his characters succinctly vocalize such themes.
So despite its downbeat tone and hints of day-to-day ugliness — domestic abuse, depression, drugs, prejudice (both toward and by our lads) — Kings struggles to rise above its theatricality: five distinct characters in a room who laugh, cry and fight. And if we do ultimately feel for these rather unlikable men, it’s more likely that we’re culturally pre-conditioned to cast a tear for boozy Irishmen who sing “Danny Boy” off-key than that we’re moved by Collins’ skill at excavating the bitter ironies of one generation of immigrants. In English and Irish Gaelic, with subtitles.
Starts Fri., Jan. 18. Regent Square
This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2008.
What a load of silliness. I would have expected a lot better than this review. In my view as someone who lived the experience, Kings is a very fine film. It is a haunting, melancholic portrait of lost souls, the people on our streets who once belonged to some place, somewhere in another time, but who have fallen out of touch with the world around them. Director Tom Collins seizes on this feeling of loneliness and misplacement and forces us to confront it, as we immerse ourselves in the lives of Git, Jap, Máirtín, Shay and Joe. The haunting, ghostly memory of Jackie makes us also mourn his passing, as he appears to his friends between sleeping and waking, between day and night.
Indeed the film itself feels caught in time between dusk and dawn, as the characters let the world pass by in the final third of the film, when an ominous, creeping awareness invades on their drunken reverie. The atmosphere is one of a suspended moment – the group of friends toast their lost companion in an eerie, empty back room, whilst muffled noise just creeps in from the bar outside. The Irish language they speak amongst themselves reflects the otherness of their lives, their misplacement in this world. As they leave and come back, it is as if they move from one world to the other, and when they finally go, they could be gone forever.
With excellent performances and a taut script, the evocative cinematography and soundtrack make this an achingly sad and beautiful work that is timeless in it’s relevance. Go and gringe at your reviews and not this fine film. Kings desreves its record nominations at the Irish Film And Television awards
Kings another view – It is possible that the major narrative of the twenty-first century will be that of immigration. With transnational movement becoming ever more common, the distances between us shrink both geographically and socially as every immigrant has a compelling individual story to share. Kings is the fertile ground where six of these stories take root, grow and intertwine. It is the first major bilingual (Irish Gaelic and English) Irish production.
In the seventies, six ambitious and energetic young men – friends and relatives – left Ireland for London with an eye to making their fortunes and eventually returning home in a blaze of glory. Like so many before them, they found work in the construction industry, toiling to build the very cities that often remained cold and unwelcoming to them. When we meet the men, it is nearly thirty years after their arrival, and one of them has died under terrible circumstances.
It is a deeply held tradition that they hold a wake for the passing of their friend, named Jackie. What makes this occasion even more tearful is that the friends haven’t followed the path they originally had set out for themselves. They have not enjoyed the same fortunes or even returned to Ireland victoriously as planned. When they finally meet to honour Jackie, drink and sadness make it inevitable that some men will take up the grievances and disappointments of the past, all the while maintaining the illusion that they have a future. In tragic situations like these, nostalgia is particularly far from the cold, hard truth.
In addition to sketching a fine sense of place, director Tom Collins elicits remarkable performances from each member of his strong cast, particularly the great Colm Meaney as Joe, a man who left behind his old Irish life for good, but at a heavy cost. These skillful actors capture all the complex and heart-rending subtleties of the immigrant experience. Through the bonds and misfires of male friendship, Kings sympathetically portrays a circle who never actually leave their homeland in either custom or commitment.
Jane Schoettle – Toronto Film Festival