Ray Pride

In Danny Boyle's gloomy, unexpected summer hit "28 Days Later," a virus ruins an corner of the world, a manmade insult that makes bloodthirsty zombies of its victims, a little thing called "Rage."

Fury and spleen, anger and invective: cinema misses these things. Fury signifying something, rather than a sense of entitlement, a frenzy of provincial self-love, say. Audiences continue to trickle into that dreary vision, if not to a movie like Gregor Jordan's "Buffalo Soldiers," which also dares traffic in doubt and scorn and satirical thrust. Perhaps the cynical mood is more off-putting than Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland's vision of love in troubled times, and Joaquin Phoenix's charm only goes so far when a peacetime military is being parodied.

"Dirty Pretty Things," directed by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Steven Knight, who was one of the co-creators of "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?," is a more classically controlled story, a rich genre entry that turns the stuff of urban legend--the misplaced human organ in the hotel room--into a thriller about London's underground, of commerce that is tolerated--using immigrants to fill unwanted jobs--and that which horrifies--body parts as a telling symbol for the exploitation of humans in general. (And who wants to be an illegal immigrant?) "The hotel business is about strangers and they will always surprise you," one of the bads tells dignified, quietly heroic Okwe, the central character, a Nigerian-born overnight desk clerk at a flash hotel, who, after a suppressed dark incident in his past, has striven always to do the right thing. Twenty-five-year-old Chewitil Ejiofor, who has made a mark on the London stage, gives a performance of such fluent complexity that one cannot imagine the range of movies he will make in the next twenty or thirty years. Think of the transparent but profoundly effective grace of Michael Caine or Gene Hackman: Ejiofor quietly embodies that kind of control in each and every scene he's in. And in its quiet, pulpy way, "Dirty Pretty Things" also engages other issues. It leaves us wondering, how much brainpower and cleverness goes to waste in an ostensibly multicultural world, or should we say, a multinational world, which refers to the statelessness of corporate entities rather than the geographical origins of individuals.

So what's human life worth? Terror, scorn, anger, let's bring them together now and consider Peter Mullan's magisterial "The Magdalene Sisters," a sustained howl against affront and dishonor. His Venice Golden Lion-winning marvel is a concentrated yowl of righteous indignation, and whatever its flaws in demonstrating the horrors visited upon its composite characters, the white-hot intensity of the actor-writer-director's gaze gives us a wrenchingly cathartic drama, a brilliant, unrelenting screed against exploitation and injustice.

Ireland has had its wealth of moral crusades through the centuries. One that persisted until 1996 was the Magdalene Laundries, sponsored by the Catholic Church to imprison young women who were thought to endanger the morals of the land, whether an unwed mother or merely cheeky. Their families signed them over to the Laundries, for a lifetime with no pay for penance for their flaws.

Mullan's earlier feature, "Orphans," was a quirky black comedy about four siblings dealing with the death of their mother, mixing anger, quirk and outright surrealism in an impressive stew. "The Magdalene Sisters," however, in its blazing fashion, is a leap upward from his best known role as an actor, the raging alcoholic at the center of Ken Loach's "My Name Is Joe."

Since its debut in the United Kingdom, "The Magdalene Sisters" has caused outrage by spokesmen for the church, but few of the complaints of sensationalism against Mullan's muscular indictment mention the tyranny visited on the young women during their imprisonment. Intriguingly, Mullan finds room in his litany of cruelties for a commanding performance from one of the wicked figures, Sister Bridget, a Nurse Ratched of the wash, played with sadistic relish by Geraldine McEwan. There is no rest for the wicked, it's said, and Sister Bridget knows no rest when disciplining the wicked.

The lead actresses play their roles as innocents, as tremulous strays: Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), who shames her family by accusing a local boy of rape at a wedding reception; unwed mother Rose (Dorothy Duff) and unregenerate flirt Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone). Her crime? The sort of beauty that makes boys bold. What community can encompass that without fear of social decline?

Mullan does not fear going over over-the-top. The movie ends with a stab at narrative closure which does not ring true, yet the fact that the laundries and their shame persisted past the mid-1990s, but are now history being unearthed in documentaries (one of which inspired Mullan), offers the sort of hope one wishes upon many other indignities in our twenty-first century dystopia.

"The Magdalene Sisters" opens Friday.

(2003-08-13)

Also by Ray Pride

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(Im Juli) A small, "Amelie"-like treat (which was produced around the same time as Jeunet's globe-straddling hit), Fatih Akin's "Im Juli" is a champion border-crosser, tossing "Run Lola Run"'s Moritz Bleibtreau into the heart of southwestern Europe in pursuit of fate.
(2003-08-05)

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I never thought I'd live to see the day when thrills in a studio movie would come from sheer competence
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Tip of the Week
Sam Green and Bill Siegel's "The Weather Underground" is an impressively sturdy documentary about a difficult-to-master slice of American history, a sweet rebuke to the narcissism-as-entertainment wing of contemporary documentary practice
(2003-07-30)

The Oh No show
(2003-07-30)

Short Runs
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Tip of the Week
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Leaving Navy Pier
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Extras, extras
(2003-07-23)

Short Runs
(2003-07-23)

Tip of the Week
(2003-07-16)

Short Runs
(2003-07-16)

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