A horrific tale of madness and abuse told with pop-eyed color and giddy humor, Neil Jordan's 1997 adaptation of the Patrick McCabe novel The Butcher Boy is a discordant and murderously funny masterpiece of the highest order. Unlike most acclaimed films of antisocial alienation and violence, which tend to always maintain a coolly entertained distance, this one dives so far into its protagonist's scrambled worldview that by the time it's all over, it takes one a little time to readjust to the world as it actually is.

Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens) is a young kid living in a small (and small-minded) Irish town during the early 1960s. Pictures of the Pope and the Kennedys adorn the dark walls of his dreary little abode, shared with his violent drunk of a father (Stephen Rea) and suicidally depressed mother (Aisling O'Sullivan). Francie himself is a red-headed fireplug of manic energy with a penchant for mad behavior and the occasional spot of bullying The whole brood is looked at askance by townspeople with airs, like the just-back-from-England Mrs. Nugent (Fiona Shaw) who calls them all "pigs," and the clucking ladies at the corner store, who shake their heads at poor, crazy little Francie: "Never had a chance, growin' up like tha', did he."

Francie has an idea as to where things went wrong, that was the day he stole some apples from the Nugents and bullied their wee one, Phillip. And, being as it's Francie who's doing the narration, we are practically forced to take his word for it. Only it's clear practically from the get-go that Francie's grasp of reality is more tenuous than it should be. The narration itself is a delight, done by Francie as an adult and voiced with buoyant, cracked glee by Rea, whose performance as Francie's sodden Da makes for an eerie counterpoint. As things go from bad to worse in Francie's life -- first Ma is shipped off to an asylum before later committing suicide, then Francie is himself sent to a reform school, at which point his religious visions begin -- he starts looking for who to blame for his predicament.

Possessed of a weirdly unshakeable and peculiarly Irish optimism, Francie slips into madness with alarming ease, enjoying the stew of sci-fi-influenced paranoia and manic obsessions bubbling in his feverish mind more so than the dreary facts of his limited life. At no point during his devolution into a murderous maniac does anyone seem committed to help him. His parents are less than useless, authority figures take at face value Francie's assurances that things are "grand," and his only friend deserts him out of fear at what Francie is becoming. Perversely, the only person in the whole film who seems to honestly listen to the boy is the Virgin Mary, who appears to him in the beautifully robed and soothingly voiced figure of Sinéad O'Connor (a wicked jab at the Church, one of many in this adamantly anti-authoritarian work). Francie tries to do the right thing -- what he refers to as winning the "Francie Brady's Not a Bad Bastard Anymore Award" -- but with nobody on his side and those demons jabbering in his full-to-bursting head, it's just not a fair fight.

Coming on the heels of Jordan's blockbuster pop-horror flick Interview with the Vampire and the David Lean-esque Irish Civil War epic Michael Collins, both excellent and quite underrated films though very much slaves to their genre, The Butcher Boy seemed almost a slap in the face to a Hollywood establishment that had just started treating him as one of their own. The viewpoint here is so madly skewed as to be almost unrecognizable as a mainstream film. The luscious cinematography and generally jaunty tone, propelled by Eliot Goldenthal's bouncy score and Rea's sardonic narration, is layered against the story's grim reality not as a cheap bit of irony, but as a means of actually voicing Francie's mindset with as little interference from reality as possible. The humor somehow makes it all the more harrowing.

Needless to say, this wasn't a popular film; there's a little too much sad reality in here for that. Coming just a few years before Columbine, The Butcher Boy, while far from being a message film, nevertheless made a strongly relevant statement about youthful violence and the culpability of adults who refuse to pay attention to the children in their midst. There are Francie Bradys out there right now, unwatched and unnoticed, who also never had a chance, and who have some very strong ideas about who is to blame for what has happened to them.

The DVD contains additional scenes, a trailer and commentary by Jordan.



Chop chop, Boy.