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Inside I'm Dancing film review
INSIDE I'M DANCING
Running time: 105 mins
Starring: Steven Robertson, James McAvoy, Romola Garai, Brenda Fricker
Brenda Fricker in a film about a severely handicapped Irish lad? No, it's not My Left Foot 2, but the new film from Damien O'Donnell, whose star shone brightly with his 1999 debut feature East Is East and then faded somewhat with the little seen Heartlands in 2002. With convincing performances, Inside I'm Dancing is the sort of film to make one sit up and think about disability in a new light, but is ultimately let down by a script that isn't sure where it wants to go.
Michael (Steven Robertson) suffers from cerebral palsy and has spent his life in a home for the disabled run by Brenda Fricker. His condition makes him extremely hard to understand and he is therefore usually passed over as being a bit simple, or ignored altogether. But everything changes when Rory (James McEvoy) arrives. Although he can only move two fingers on one hand, Rory is trouble: he puts gel in his hair, listens to loud music, and chats up the nurses. More importantly, Rory can understand every word Michael says, and after a couple of initial hiccups, the two become fast friends.
Soon the deadly duo are out terrorising Dublin in their wheelchairs: stealing from their charity boxes in order to buy booze, getting into discos and generally behaving like any normal pair of twenty-one-year-olds. But Butch and Sundance of the four-wheeled world have a dream: freedom in the form of their own apartment. After several pleas to the relevant boards, it takes the intervention of Michael's long-lost father to secure their own place. What's more, when they sign the gorgeous Siobhan (Romola Garai) as their personal assistant, things even begin to look up on the romance front.
The performances are excellent throughout, notably from the two leads. McEvoy is ballsy, antagonising and utterly charming, while Robertson gives Michael a wide-eyed impish nature. The two are hugely convincing together and their exploits raise more than a smile on several occasions. There is no problem with the heart of this film. What it lacks however, is a coherent screenplay which has some sort of focus. The film leads us down several paths: the relationship between Michael and his long-lost father, the difficulty for anyone disabled to have a relationship with a fully-abled person, and the general problems that anyone in a wheelchair faces in life, but ultimately it fails to provide any convincing answers to the questions it half-heartedly proposes. Too many of the events are also rather conveniently depicted, notably a cop-out ending that may be designed to move, but seems tagged on as a handy way of finishing the film.
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