Breakfast on Pluto film review

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BREAKFAST ON PLUTO

There are few sadder sights in cinema than seeing a once-lauded director trying, and failing, to recapture former glories. With Breakfast on Pluto Neil Jordan revisits many of the themes of his most famous film The Crying Game but the results this time round are out of touch and more often than not embarrassing. The blame should be shared between Jordan and longtime collaborator Pat McCabe on whose novel the film is based - here they have created a work that cries out for a new Irish cinema to come along and replace the old guard as soon as possible.

The story revolves around Patrick Braden (Cillian Murphy), a young boy better known as Kitty who grows up in an Irish town in the 70s and soon realises that he is the only one there interested in wearing women's clothes. Living in a society that frowns on his behaviour - there is the minor point of the troubles to be going on with - Kitty leaves his native country for England, a land he finds more liberal but not without its dangers for a young man like himself.

Among the characters he encounters are a glum magician and a rowdy actor - played by Jordan stalwarts Stephen Rea and Brendan Gleeson, but Kitty's real quest is to find his mother who left him in the care of a priest (Liam Neeson) back in the old country.

Breakfast on Pluto never finds a steady tone. Instead it flits between comedy and drama in an awkward manner, not helped by giving each sequence a chapter heading and filling it with a sense of misplaced whimsy. Murphy gamely toughs it out but his central character is neither particularly believable nor likeable. The humour is constantly overcooked and the surprising moments of real drama simply jar with the otherwise light tone.

With its crass political message, the film offers nothing new to Jordan's canon and simply retreads themes he has covered before - namely the troubles - without offering us anything new. Characters flit in and out for little apparent reason and the script only offers Murphy the chance to run the gamut of emotions from A to A. A misfire that goes on far too long.

Paul Hurley