Child's play

John Boorman's four-star General

by Peter Keough

THE GENERAL. Written and directed by John Boorman. With Brendan Gleeson, Jon Voight, Adrian Dunbar, Sean McGinley, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Eamon Owens, and Angeline Ball. A Sony Pictures release. At the Avon.

The last day in the life of Martin Cahill (Brendan Gleeson), a/k/a "The General," modern crime legend and the scourge and delight of Dublin, begins auspiciously enough. The fleets of police cars on the street outside his home and the rows of constables poking their heads over his hedges have vanished. But Cahill has reason to be suspicious as he starts his car -- an IRA hitman sprints out of the foliage and pumps three bullets into his head.

So begins John Boorman's sly and sardonic masterpiece The General, and shot in the saturated inks of a tabloidish black and white, it's a sordid end indeed. Moments later, though, an odd thing happens. The bullets magically zap from the murdered man's body and return to the killer's pistol. In a twist of whimsy, the film rewinds, and a close-up of Cahill's restored face dissolves into his as a young boy in the act of fleeing with a bag of stolen potatoes while taunting the police in pursuit.

That sequence sums up the spirit of The General, the mixture of ruthlessness and play, the circular fatality of tragedy, myth, and games. Combining the generic tautness of Boorman's Point Blank and Deliverance with the depth of character, setting, and tone of his autobiographical Hope and Glory, it's the director's best film to date.

In part that's due to his subject -- Cahill proves a more archetypal figure than all the Arthurian heavyweights of Boorman's Excalibur. From his early days stealing produce and cream buns (one of his few vices), his ambition, ruthlessness, and complexity grow. He becomes the Robin Hood-like leader of a gang of stalwarts (portrayed in standout supporting performances by Adrian Dunbar and Sean McGinley in particular) from his slum neighborhood of Hollyfield who are known for their daring, cunning, and sense of the absurd.

It's this last trickster quality that most distinguishes Cahill -- though he talks a good fight in his condemnation of colonial, capitalist, government, and clerical oppressors, even squatting in a tent to preserve Hollyfield from the developers, the anarchic exuberance of play is what incites him. It's a contagious sensibility, as Boorman unfolds with sleek dexterity Cahill's heist of a fortress-like jewelry warehouse, or his ingenious purloining of a Vermeer and other invaluable canvases from a patrician mansion.

Gleeson's performance, too, makes the outlaw irresistible. He portrays Cahill as a shambling, shapeless buffoon who proves lithe as a ghost drifting through a household selecting booty and voyeuristically observing the secret life of the inhabitants. He's most entertaining in his ploys to escape detection, going in public in ski masks and in a bulging parka that makes him look like an overgrown refugee from South Park, or employing hilarious ruses to baffle the police on his tail. Hand perpetually concealing his face, he's a vaudevillean enigma, a master showman in the art of covering up, donning Groucho glasses in, as a barrister intones, "a silly attempt to disguise himself," then doing a striptease when the press demands he "show himself."

Boorman does show him, however, and not always for laughs. It's all fun and games until Cahill maims a witness with a car bomb, nails an underling suspected of treachery to a pool table, and has sister-in-law Tina (Angeline Ball) move in with him and wife Frances (Maria Doyle Kennedy) to form a ménage à trois. (Cahill's domestic arrangements are bizarre, endearing, and oddly conventional.) Far from being a Tarantino-esque pastiche, Cahill is something much more primal -- a throwback to a tribal, pagan past. In short, he's a juvenile delinquent, and perpetual childhood has its price. As he enjoys one of his more flagrant jokes, he collapses. One of his puerile pleasures has turned on him -- the cream buns have finally taken their toll, leaving him with diabetes.

But it's not just his body that lets him down -- his colleagues and his sense of humor betray him as well. Shadowed by his nemesis, a police inspector played by a raffishly sinister and ambivalently upright Jon Voight, The General shambles to its fatal, final rendezvous with picaresque inevitability. With half his crew on smack, the IRA on his tail after he sells the stolen paintings to the Provos, even his pigeons butchered by the cloddish cops, Cahill's fate is squalid and typical. Not so its metamorphosis into the rueful beauty of The General, Boorman's portrait of the artist as a career criminal.

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Martin and John

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