By Michael Gray
In an extraordinary collaboration involving four members of the Quinn family, Irish-American film director Paul Quinn makes his feature debut with "This Is My Father." Quinn’s film is a moving romantic drama about a man’s search for the father he has never known, and the ill-fated teenage romance that his mother kept secret from him throughout his life. Quinn developed the screenplay from a true story that his mother had heard as a child growing up in Ireland. The film stars Paul’s brother Aidan as a luckless farm worker who falls for a much younger woman above his social station, and his brother Declan is the director of photography.
A cameo performance by their actress sister Marian Quinn completes the sibling quartet.
The film is an accomplished first outing by Paul, and he boldly mines a stratum of Irish lore that had previously shown serious signs of audience exhaustion. Another film about malevolent monsignors meddling in the love life of their parishioners, set in electricity-free pre-war rural Ireland, doesn’t exactly inspire enthusiasm, nor make the punters turn out in droves at the cinema turnstiles. But Paul Quinn deftly sidesteps the traps and pitfalls of this clichéd terrain to produce a tale lifted above the ordinary by polished storytelling, the simple beauty and economy of Declan’s cinematography, and a performance by Aidan that is arguably his best work on-screen to date.
Aidan is ably supported by a stellar cast of top Irish and American actors, among them John Cusack as a flamboyant ‘rial photographer, Colm Meany as a swishy traveler who runs a B&B, and Stephen Rea as a prurient priest obsessed with the carnal desires of his flock. Even the minor roles in the film are played by top Irish actors like Brendan Gleeson and John Kavanagh.
Veteran actor James Caan also stars as a forlorn Chicagoan who travels to Ireland to solve the mystery of his father’s identity, after he finds an old photograph of his mother with a handsome young man. Caan plays Kieran Johnson, a jaded high school teacher worn down on the outside by years of trying to teach history to bored suburban teenagers, and hollowed out from within by a childless marriage that ended in widowhood, and the pain of never knowing his father. He drags himself into school each day to try to make his uninterested pupils appreciate the past, knowing that he may never unravel the details of his own — his elderly mother is debilitated by a stroke and couldn’t tell him about his father even if she wanted to break her long silence on the subject.
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He resolves to go to Ireland, taking his half-sister’s troublesome son with him for company. The presence of the nephew gives the director a second, lighter, tier to the film, as the lad (Jacob Tierney) meets with skittish Irish teenage girls, gets slagged about his dance stylings at the local disco, and feels the first flush of romance, while his uncle is uncovering the painful truth about the love that conceived him more than half a century earlier. The story switches deftly over and back between the events of the summer of 1939, when Kieran’s mother fell in love with Kieran O’Day (Aidan Quinn), and the present day when her grandson does the same thing, but without the tragic consequences.
The root cause of this tragedy is one of the most divisive issues in the history of rural Ireland, a cause of deeper discord than the more obvious problem of religion on the island — that of land ownership.
Kieran O’Day was, in the parlance of the time, a poorhouse bastard, who had been adopted by a childless couple (Donal Donnelly and Maria McDermottroe) to work on the farm they rented from a wealthy local widow. The widow’s daughter Fiona (Moya Farrelly), a free-spirited girl sent home early from boarding school in Galway after a row with the nuns, meets up with Kieran, invites him to go dancing, and they gradually fall in love. His stepparents live in perpetual dread of being evicted from the few bony acres off which they scrape a living, and if the widow (Gina Moxley) finds out about the romance between the uneducated orphan and her darling daughter, she’ll send the bailiffs around immediately to toss out her tenants. From her bitter perspective, the affair between the farmhand and her much younger daughter can only be a plot to get the girl pregnant and inherit the land through the offspring. So Kieran and Fiona keep their love secret. But in a small village secrets are hard to keep, and soon the full force of the Catholic church is enlisted to keep them apart. The simple, earnest Kieran proves more sensitive to threats of eternal damnation than the bohemian Fiona, but his efforts to stay away from her prove futile, as his love is stronger than his fear of hell. They resume the affair and suffer consequences from which neither they nor the village will ever recover.
As the socially mismatched couple, both Aidan Quinn and Moya Farrelly are outstanding. Farrelly is incandescent in her first major role as the livewire Fiona. She delivers an eager, uninhibited performance that would be unthinkable from an American actress of the same age.
Aidan Quinn immerses himself without a trace of Hollywood vanity in the part of the emotionally stunted, shy farmer, and belies the perception from his earlier roles on screen that he was cast more for the decorative value of his azure eyes than any facility he might have with accents and nuances of character. Not many Hollywood stars would willingly submit to a brutal haircut that looks like it was clipped with set of sheep shears and combed with a beetfork, or costumes that might be Hessian sacks aspiring to be tweed. The awkward body language and inarticulate speech of a full-grown orphan, accustomed more to cutting turf in the bog than talking to people, limits the actor’s options in conveying the qualities that make Kieran O’Day attractive to a girl like Fiona. But Aidan projects a sincerity and decency that is believable as the couple draws closer together during the course of the film.
This same decency pervades the performance of James Caan, but a more tired version of it, as befits the role of the older man saddled with this sad background.
The Quinns’ use of language is impressive throughout, both in Aidan’s Irish accent and Paul’s writing. As Irish Americans who spent some of their childhood in Ireland, they both have a good feel for the differences in the use of English on either side of the ocean. And Paul’s old-fashioned ability to tell a good story circumvents any likelihood of audience recoil from a tale that features clairvoyant fortune tellers, and putting a curse on enemies, as components of the plot. Modern Irish filmmakers shun the scenic pleasures of Ireland with its rustic parishes and petrifying priests, with a view to avoiding the clichés of the two Johns, Hinde and Ford. Yet they rarely produce films of quality that are uniquely Irish. With "This Is My Father," this team of brothers from Chicago by way of Offaly has succeeded admirably in depicting an Ireland of the past and of the present that is credible, sentimental, and funny as it struggles to shake free of its old prejudices and cramped emotions.
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"This is My Father" opens Friday, May 7, in select theaters. Also, a documentary about the making of the film, directed by Fergus Tighe (of ‘Clash of the Ash’ renown), is available on video from Power Films in Galway. It was shot on location in Ireland during Paul Quinn’s four-week shooting schedule for the feature film, and is titled "Three Brothers."