Movies

Crime-Family Man

By Diane Carson  ,  Michael Sragow ,  and  Bill Gallo

THE GENERAL
Written and directed by John Boorman

Jimmy Cagney brought the same electric physicality to gangsters that he did to song-and-dance men. He gave a bright-eyed mug like his character in Public Enemy extraordinary powers of attraction and repulsion. In The General, Brendan Gleeson enacts a real-life criminal chieftain -- Dublin's notorious Martin Cahill -- with a belly-hanging-out buffoonery that is just as magnetic as Cagney's feral grace. In the course of the film, Cahill's gang loots a bank, some swank estates and even a jewelry-manufacturing plant, putting a hundred employees out of work. Covering his face with his hand to avoid detection, Gleeson's Cahill plays peekaboo with the law. But the audience sees everything, from his rock-hard street smarts to his twin Achilles' heels of paranoia and nostalgia.

The General is brilliant and engulfing: Writer/director John Boorman catapults us into a one-man crime wave. The movie is basically a turbulent flashback, beginning and ending with Cahill's death. His life rushes before his inner eye in the split second before the IRA guns him down in his car. By the time the hit occurs, in 1994, he's a risk to everyone. This combination godfather, jester and thug has become the far-too-public enemy of all Dublin authorities, rebels included.

In his imagination, Cahill is an underclass hero to the end. At the brink of death he remembers a youthful raid when he stole cigarettes for his mom and cream cakes for himself and the girl next door (his future wife). As a teen in the '60s he views the goods in the world outside his family's housing project as his for the taking. He isn't bitter about life there, and later, as a young man, he idealizes the place, refusing to leave when the city starts to tear it down. (During his rise and fall he trusts only men and women who once dwelled in "my house.")

Cahill's worldview is elemental: "It's Us against Them." Us is the kind of folk who live in projects, and Them is everybody else. It's a vision beneath or beyond politics. The General is so vivid and engrossing because Boorman alternately honors and debunks Cahill's perspective.

It's now a reviewer's cliche to call the latest Hollywood thrill machine "a roller-coaster ride." To borrow from poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, The General is a Coney Island of the mind. Sure, you know Cahill will be killed, but Boorman's approach is bracingly antimoralistic and open-ended; unless you've read Paul Williams' nonfiction source book of the same title, you can't predict Cahill's behavior. And even if you have read Williams' book, you can't tell what tone a scene will take or what references it will call up. When Cahill tries to protect his housing project from destruction, he doesn't just get in the way of the wrecking ball: He squats in a small trailer amid the rubble. When the trailer is burned down, he squats in a tent. The whole sequence resembles an absurdist recasting of the dispossession scenes in The Grapes of Wrath -- an impression clinched by the film's subtly changeable, searingly expressive black-and-white cinematography. Cahill, as well as Boorman, succeeds at putting his own spin on valiant Depression imagery. The effect is improbably, bitterly hilarious.

Gleeson creates a figure of unceasing fascination, rooting his character in a deep-seated wiliness and volatility that energize every inch of his big face and stocky body. His Cahill is the master of opaque rumination, the wizard of deadpan. Cahill's ploys are as intriguing for baldness as for boldness. He hides his thinning hair and thick features with ski masks, helmets or bulky, hooded Windbreakers. After he commits a crime and before it is discovered, he'll walk into a police station and register complaints of harassment, thus sealing up a lead-cinch alibi. His evasive actions do double duty: They permit him to dodge indictments while openly expressing his contempt for conventional law and order. At his peak of comic effrontery, he won't admit to reporters that the police are tailing him -- even when two uniformed cops are walking right behind him.

You can judge how much energy goes into his public masks by his direct, intense focus when he's instructing his half-dozen top henchmen about impending larcenies. Relaxing at home with his wife and kids, he turns into that rarity in '90s movies, a warm, genuine presence. You believe in him as an offbeat family guy; you believe that his striking, adoring wife, Frances (Maria Doyle Kennedy), would encourage him to sleep with her sprightly kid sister, Tina (Angeline Ball), and that the siblings would compare notes on lovemaking like the best of gal pals. It's less a menage a trois than a three-way marriage; Cahill divides his time between his place and his sister-in-law's. And he isn't shaken when the cops give him guff about it. Why should he care? It's all in the family.

The appeal of Cahill's Us-against-Them ethos is that it leaves his followers feeling galvanized and protected, able to do as they please as long as they're loyal and useful to the boss. In its own left-handed fashion, The General is the portrait of a leader -- a man whose allies happily accept his will and help him impose it on anyone. And Cahill is undeniably resourceful. If a group called Concerned Parents Against Drugs unfairly tags one of his henchmen as a pusher, then swarms at his front door, Cahill responds by enlisting Concerned Criminals Against Drugs and organizing a counterdemonstration. Like so much in the movie, the episode is implausible but true.

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