The General Written and directed by John Boorman Starring Brendan Gleeson, Adrian Dunbar, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Angeline Ball and Jon Voight   A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Sammo in the slammer; Mark Hamill on "The Simpsons" "You've Got Mail" Reviewed by Laura Miller Nora Ephron's update of "The Shop Around the Corner" rails against corporate chain stores to predictably bland effect "The Prince of Egypt" Reviewed by Charles Taylor A kitschy cartoon epic that's not for kids -- or adults ___________________ Learn more about Irish history at barnesandnoble.com ___________________   Y E S T E R D A Y Safe Haven By Charles Taylor Director John Boorman talks about his new film, "The General," family values and his fascination with nonconformity (12/17/98)   R E C E N T_. M O V I E S Home Movies By Charles Taylor John Boorman's enchanted comedy "Where the Heart Is" sings the praises of hearth and home (12/14/98) "Shakespeare in Love" Reviewed by Laura Miller Ben Affleck upstages Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes in this clever but clichéd romantic comedy (12/11/98) "A Simple Plan" Reviewed by Charles Taylor Sam Raimi's first hard-hitting film offers a brutally realistic portrayal of what can happen when upright people take one wrong turn (12/11/98) "Star Trek: Insurrection" Reviewed by Andrew O'Hehir Nostalgia ain't what it used to be (12/11/98) Hope springs eternal By Edward Lewine Hope Davis talks about her upcoming features, "Mumford" and "Arlington Road," and why she's no Hollywood day-tripper (12/10/98)   BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

HEIST SOCIETY | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - "The General" insists that each side of Cahill is equally true. He can be hilariously cheeky. On trial for robbing a betting parlor, Cahill walks into court and nonchalantly asks the judge if they can finish up early that day. "I have to draw me dole," he explains. But he's dangerous as well. During the trial, Cahill has a bomb planted in the car of a key prosecution witness, and we see Cahill threaten another witness as she sleeps in her bed at night. Boorman doesn't use those scenes to scold us for laughing at Cahill. On some level, even he's drawn to this scoundrel. Boorman (who's English by birth but has lived in Ireland for years) understands the source of Cahill's rebelliousness. Growing up on an "estate" (a housing project) in working-class Dublin, Cahill has felt a succession of boots on his throat -- those belonging to the British, the cops, the church. That's what has bred his anti-authoritarian bravado and his fierce loyalty to his working-class roots. Boorman acknowledges the reckless dignity of living your life by the rules you set. You sense that dignity in Cahill when he refuses to let his kids take a shiny coin proffered by a cop, or in the out-in-the-open ménage of Cahill, Frances and her sister Tina (Angeline Ball), who bears him a child. (One of the film's most tender moments is the sight of the three of them out for dinner, lovingly holding hands at the restaurant table.) But Boorman knows that an absolute refusal of any authority leads to chaos. Cahill is thrown for a loop when a working-class woman, one of his old neighbors, asks him, "What d'you stand for -- thievin' and killin' and scarin' people to death?" He has no possible answer. Working-class Dublin doesn't provide Boorman with as grand a setting as he had in "Excalibur," "Hope and Glory" or "Beyond Rangoon," each of those films conceived as a grand quest. And "The General" doesn't allow Boorman to indulge the fanciful streak best epitomized by his lovely, unjustly ignored family comedy "Where the Heart Is." Shot by Seamus Deasy in sharp wide-screen black-and-white, which vividly renders the characters and the setting, "The General" may be the most intimate and matter-of-fact of Boorman's films. Movies like "Deliverance" and "Excalibur" revealed Boorman as a master of scope. "The General," which is one of his masterpieces, proves the depth at which he's working. This is the sort of close examination of character that can come only from a filmmaker who's absolutely sure of himself. It's not simply a challenge to make us invest ourselves in a character who is, in many ways, a bad man; it takes utter, unblinking confidence to fuse contradictory views of a film's central character into a cohesive whole, to insist that a character can be made sense of only as a contradiction. Martin Cahill is in some ways a more complex version of Bunny, the good-natured hood Brendan Gleeson played earlier this year in Paddy Breathnach's wonderful "I Went Down." He's Bunny with a vicious streak and a tragic awareness of a familiar world passing away. That awareness is often indistinguishable from Cahill's naiveté, as when he steals a gold record and, discovering that it's merely a regular record spray-painted gold, regards it as a symbol of the world's shoddiness and dishonesty. Keeping his face covered up with his hands while in court or walking the streets in balaclavas to keep his identity hidden, Cahill borders on the absurd. And he can be petty to the point of self-satisfied cruelty. He has an unholy need to goad his opponents beyond their boundaries. At one point, Cahill prods Inspector Kenny -- a hard-headed, eminently fair man who can't help sensing what Martin might have been -- into beating him up and then gloats, "You've had to come down to my level." (It's a measure of Voight's superb, lived-in performance that he makes us understand Inspector Kenny's deep shame after using his fists on Cahill.) Why don't we reject Cahill? For one thing, he's a performer with an innate flair for showmanship and impeccable timing. On a deeper level, there's undeniable feeling in the man, an outsized appetite for life, bone-deep love for his family and enough belief in a vision of what life should be to have his heart broken when he sees that vision falling apart. The weirdest, truest example of Cahill's largeness of spirit can be seen in the few seconds in which he faces the young IRA gunmen sent to kill him. A rueful smile crosses his face as he sees reflection of his own youthful cocky self. I can offer no greater praise for Gleeson's performance than to say that it's so alive, so fully realized, that he not only makes you mourn a bastard, he makes you feel as if part of the life force is snuffed out along with Martin Cahill. Cahill's story is one of a sort of squandered greatness. In the last 11 years -- with "Hope and Glory" (1987), "Where the Heart Is" (1990), "Beyond Rangoon" (1995) and now "The General" -- the story of John Boorman's career is one of greatness realized. Though at times it's felt as if Boorman's greatness was being squandered: on the studios that dumped his movies, on the audiences who ignored them and on the critics who reviewed them so insipidly. But Boorman is one of the handful of working filmmakers who can legitimately be considered a giant of the medium. Having proved himself capable of visionary, go-for-broke filmmaking, he has gone on, in these last four films, to become a spellbinding storyteller of enormous warmth and humor, and a master of characterization. Most filmmakers exhaust their favorite themes long before they stop returning to them. As Boorman has learned to concentrate and focus his obsessions, his treatment of them has become more expansive, more penetrating than ever. Several times during "The General," Boorman uses the voice of Van Morrison to stand in for the spirit of Martin Cahill. Boorman has said that he heard Cahill's character in the rawness of Morrison's voice, with its suggestion of both tradition and wildness. He might have been referring to the quality that Morrison, quoting the great Irish tenor John McCormack, called "the yarrrrragh." That word suggests something -- it could be pain or exuberance -- called up from the guts; something both preverbal and suggestive of nuances of meaning beyond words; something primal and yet utterly distinctive; something that might be beautiful or ugly, but is always true. "The General" has the yarrrrragh in its soul. SALON | Dec. 18, 1998