MOVIE REVIEWS
ON the surface, there’s nothing surprising about ”This Is My Father,” a downcast tribute by the filmmaking Quinn brothers (actor Aidan, director Paul and cinematographer Declan) to their Irish heritage.
The story is a Romeo-and-Juliet fable played as a somewhat hackneyed homage to the misery our Old World ancestors endured. And, this being set in 1930s Ireland, that means loads of drink, discrimination, superstition and, saints preserve us, rock-hard piety from the Catholic Church.
But the film is redeemed by Aidan Quinn’s restrained, achingly beautiful performance – he has never been better – and his brother Declan’s hypnotic, extraordinarily poetic photography. By the time ”This Is My Father” reaches its tearful conclusion, the tragedy is no less crushing for being inevitable.
The movie opens with an American schoolteacher named Kieran (James Caan) who, tired of drifting through the lassitude of late middle age, travels with his teen-age nephew back to his aged mother’s County Galway village in search of the father he never knew.
Caan appears for only a short time in the film, which is almost entirely told as a series of flashbacks. Quinn plays Caan’s long-lost father (also named Kieran), and Moya Farrelly is the spirited young woman who would become his mother.
Quinn’s Kieran is a strong-backed country boy, shy and stout-hearted but none too bright, who lives with the kindly tenant farmer couple (Donal Donnelly and Maria McDermottroe) who took him in as an orphan. He falls for flashy Fiona (Farrelly), daughter of uppity Widow Flynn (Gina Moxley), who won’t hear of her Fiona taking up with a ”poorhouse bastard” like Kieran.
The two carry out their illicit courtship secretly, and we know it cannot come to any good. What’s most moving, though, is the accumulation of images and small details, which paint a powerfully evocative portrait of a society smothering under the weight of tradition and the gravity of their lives.
It’s hard to see what the framing device with Caan adds to the film, and the subplot involving the rebellious teen-ager is a positive distraction. There’s a weird scene in which John Cusack, playing an American aerial photographer, descends from the sky in an airplane, and visits with Kieran and Fiona on the beach. America equals freedom and lightness, get it? It’s exactly what you’d expect from the sons of immigrants, as the Quinn brothers are. Theirs is a most moving piece of work.