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Pig HeavenDavid Edelstein on The Butcher Boy, The Spanish Prisoner, and Lost in Space.

By David EdelsteinPosted Sunday, April 5, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET

The Butcher Boy
 Directed by Neil Jordan
Warner Bros.

The Spanish Prisoner
Directed by David Mamet
Sony Pictures Classics

Lost in Space
Directed by Stephen Hopkins
New Line Cinema
 		Movies

Pig Heaven
 Three movies about inner space, outer space, and no place you ever want to be.

By David Edelstein
 (posted Saturday, April 4)
Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens) in The Butcher Boy
Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens) in The Butcher Boy
Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy arrives at a moment in the United States when empathy for adolescents who self-righteously slaughter people is in understandably short supply. It's lucky that the movie (from a 1992 novel by the Irish writer Patrick McCabe) is sufficiently expressive to work without eliciting conventional empathy--without the director trying to manipulate you to admit, "In that kid's place, I'd have killed those people, too." The Butcher Boy is a little opaque and sometimes unintelligible. (Irish can be the moother of awl accents.) But Jordan aims high and hits his main target: He manages to illuminate the ways in which adolescents--those exquisitely sensitive receptacles of the world's beauty and trash--can be driven to create their own moral universe and how that universe can have a horrifying logic.
To go with this new moral universe, McCabe's book creates its own aesthetic universe, with its own run-on, matter-of-factly fantastical language. So does Jordan. The director uses liberal (and effective) dollops of narration, and blurs the boundaries between the protagonist's internal and external worlds. Francie, as played by Eamonn Owens, isn't a traditional wide-eyed male ingénue. He has piggy eyes, a broad nose, and red hair. Early on, watching this bluff bully boy pummel people and seize the comic book collection of a bespectacled classmate, Philip Nugent, you might not even realize that he's the narrator--your way into the story. It's Francie's buddy, Joe, who's the cute kid, the ingénue; and it's Joe's Judas-like renunciation of Francie (and his defection to the Nugent camp) that drives our anti-hero even deeper into his hothouse isolation.
But it's Philip's mother (Fiona Shaw) who kindles Francie's deepest rage. A prig who has spent time in London and developed English airs (horrid), she publicly labels Francie and his family "pigs." The tag eats at the boy, who watches his pathetically defenseless ma (a lovely turn by Aisling O'Sullivan) sink into despair and insanity, and his trumpet-playing da (Stephen Rea) fall even further into whiskey-soaked wooziness. The boy's fantasies now revolve around pigs: When Kennedy and Khrushchev go nose-to-nose over missiles in Cuba, Francie envisions an atomic bomb dropping on his beloved lake and a village filled with blackened pig carcasses. He goes to work at a slaughterhouse. Fueled by tragedy, Francie breaks into the Nugents' house, eats their pastries, and does on the carpet in front of their telly what any self-respecting pig (and self-hating boy) would do.
Jordan, whose early films were boldly expressionistic (and whose last one, the big-budget Michael Collins, was a little too boldly straight), has grown more subtle in his subversiveness. Except for the outright fantasy sequences--the big alien insect heads affixed to various adults' heads, the omnipresent pigs, Sinéad O'Connor as the Virgin Mary (take that, pontiff!)--the mise en scène is only slightly warped. You might think you're in the realist, flowered-wallpaper genre, until the flowers on the wallpaper seem to exude poison vapors. Elliot Goldenthal's ingenious score skips lyrically from the music hall to the grave, with side trips into antic rock 'n' roll, squalling jazz, and traditional Irish airs. Goldenthal triumphantly connects the movie's mercurial moods (and modes); I can't imagine The Butcher Boy working without his music.
Artists who create their own language are worth the extra effort it takes to follow along. Even so, Jordan could have made things easier. Early on, he seems more focused on transforming the nearby lakes and mountains into mythical vistas than on exploring the bond between Francie and Joe. That means that later, when Joe drifts into friendship with Philip, Francie's obsession with getting back at him comes out of left field. The movie is something of a closed system. Young Owens has brio and great timing, but he might be too serenely in his own world to convey the torment out of which the butcher boy acts.
Brady (Owens) and Joe (Alan Boyle) in The Butcher Boy
Brady (Owens) and Joe (Alan Boyle) in The Butcher Boy
Neil Jordan still has his capacity for outrage, though, and his movies can be mordant and ironic without lapsing into facile cynicism. He has subjects to explore, not theorems to prove. In many ways, he's David Mamet's opposite. Mamet executes the same dramatic proof over and over, using slightly different variables. The laws of his universe are fixed: 1) everyone wants to screw you over; 2) if you think you've found someone who doesn't want to screw you over, reread Rule 1; 3) if the person who you think doesn't want to screw you over talks about how everyone else wants to screw you over, reread Rule 2--the generous are weak and the weak must be punished; 4) you must drink blood to be a man. Frequently, Mamet's characters enunciate these life-lessons themselves, in language so stilted that the phoniness must be purposeful. Is this how Mamet views all communication--as an attempt to negotiate with, and gain power over, someone else? When his actors speak, they're so deliberate that you can visualize the dashes and ellipses in the script.
Joe Ross (Scott) and Jimmy Dell (Martin) in The Spanish Prisoner
Joe Ross (Scott) and Jimmy Dell (Martin) in The Spanish Prisoner
Amazingly, this is one of the reasons Mamet's new film, The Spanish Prisoner, works so smoothly. In this Hitchcock-style paranoid suspense tale (without big action set pieces, however), Mamet surrounds his naive protagonist (Campbell Scott) with characters who speak portentously: You never know if they're lying and this is all an elaborate trap or if they're just being Mamety. This fellow has designed a Process (read: MacGuffin) that's going to make the Company an unimaginably vast sum of money, but will he be adequately compensated? The sleek gazillionaire (Steve Martin) he meets at a fancy resort tells him (portentously) that he should take the Process somewhere else. Will our hero be fixed up with the gazillionaire's portentously unglimpsed sister or take a tumble with the big-eyed portentously love-struck ingénue (Rebecca Pidgeon)? How does Mamet pull this off--being simultaneously so clever and so thunderously obvious? He shows you all his cards, he telegraphs his twists and his ending, he presents a glib and noxious view of humanity, and he manages to make an entertaining movie. Brilliant!
When Lost in Space premiered on television in the '60s, I was at an age when I couldn't see--and, frankly, didn't much care--how terrible it was. I lived for that cliffhanger gimmick: the opening teaser for the next show coming at the end of the previous one, with someone being, say, sucked into quicksand and that three-note musical danger motif and the words "To Be Continued." The device itself was more fun than the actual crises, which, in true Saturday afternoon serial style, were always solved more easily (and with more cheating) than those dire chords implied.
However camp and dull the old TV show was, its premise--The Swiss Family Robinson in orbit--was a fine one, and there's no reason that New Line can't grind out two or three or four pictures and build its own space "franchise." The new Lost in Space is laughably unoriginal, but you don't risk this kind of money on unexplored space. The script is by Akiva Goldsman, who wrote the last two Batman movies--the facetious ones that made some money but effectively sank the series. Goldsman has a talent for the commercial irony of MTV and car commercials, the kind of irony that pretends to be subversive while cunningly shoring up all the old conventions. The women still function the way their '60s counterparts did--Mom (Mimi Rogers) is warmly maternal, and Judy (Heather Graham) is still a chill, sexy blonde--except now they have Ph.D.s, too, so that in between fulfilling their stereotypical functions they can spew science-techie dialogue and order the men to "stop hosing down the decks with testosterone" and get back to the business of getting their spaceship off some rapidly disintegrating planet.
Judy (Graham), Mom (Rogers), and Dr. Smith (Oldman) in Lost in Space
Judy (Graham), Mom (Rogers), and Dr. Smith (Oldman) in Lost in Space
Lost in Space takes place in a hermetically sealed pop culture universe. I had fun picking up the in-jokes and spotting the old cast members in cameo roles, but an older, less TV-centric colleague began to grumble about being "shut out" after 15 minutes and slunk away after 30. Coward! I enjoyed Lost in Space, mechanical as it is, although at times I wanted to turn it off, get a soda, use the toilet, make a few phone calls, and come back to it later. After the Robinsons and their hot-dog pilot Don West (Matt LeBlanc) get sabotaged by evil Dr. Smith (Gary Oldman) and hurtled into the furthest quadrants of the galaxy, the film turns episodic, and all the cliffhangers in the world can't keep it from drifting into tedium.
Professor Robinson (Hurt) in Lost in Space
Professor Robinson (Hurt) in Lost in Space
The big cliffhangers: Will Professor Robinson (William Hurt) get his priorities straight, set aside his hyperdrives, and become a real father to his son, Will? (In other words, will Will have the will to bond with Will?) Will the Robinsons and Don curb the dastardly deeds of Dr. Smith without killing the little queen? (As Mom puts it: "How can we bring civilization to the stars if we can't remain civilized?") Will Judy accept the fact that she and Don are "the only single man and woman of consenting age in the galaxy" and get it on with this stud puppy or will she find herself between the Robot's dexterous pincers? What possessed New Line to cast Hurt in the role of a professorial patriarch? Bearded, gnomic, and groggy, he's trying to think deep thoughts but looks truly lost in space.

Links

The site for The Butcher Boy (with a resplendent blood-red background) includes a trailer, stills, cast bios, etc. Sony Pictures Classics promotes The Spanish Prisoner. The official Lost in Space site invites you to create a planet and unleash a Robot on your desktop. And that's just the beginning of the fun. Nostalgic for the TV series? (Or simply never saw it?) Here's one fan's episode guide. Cinemania's "Movie Times Page" lists the locations and times for movies in most U.S. cities. Click here for more Slate movie reviews.

David Edelstein is Slate's film critic.

Stills from: The Butcher Boy by Pat Redmond © 1998 Geffen Pictures; The Spanish Prisoner by James Bridges © 1998 Sony Pictures Classics Entertainment Inc.; Lost in Space by Jack English © 1998 New Line Cinema.
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David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. You can read his reviews in "Reel Time" and in "Movies." He can be contacted at .
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