(John Boorman, Ireland 2006, 107 min.)
The latest film from the director of Deliverance, Excalibur, and Hope and Glory is an unusually gripping and witty doppelganger thriller set in contemporary Dublin. Veteran character actor Brendan Gleeson plays Liam O’Leary, a venture capitalist whose world turned upside down when a seemingly malevolent lookalike plots to take Liam’s place at his job and at home with Liam’s neglected wife (Kim Cattrall).
Program Notes
A bit of background for The Tiger’s Tail’s setting: The “tiger” of the film’s title refers to the phenomenon of the “Celtic Tiger” in Ireland. This is, in turn, a metaphor for Ireland’s economic boom of the last fifteen years, similar to the economic “tigers” of East Asia – South Korea, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. However, some economic observers have lamented that the wealth generated in this boom has been unevenly distributed, leading to greater inequality between the rich and poor of the country. This environment of great successes and great losses is the backdrop for the The Tiger’s Tail.
This film has earned the veteran British filmmaker John Boorman (Deliverance, Excalibur) a considerable amount of both praise and criticism. It is also a film that he has been developing in his mind for decades now. Over that time, it has grown into both a very personal and political film. In a director’s statement, Boorman described one of the film’s central themes as rooted in his own life, “Ever since I became the father of twins and watched their mysterious sameness and otherness, I harboured the notion of a film on the subject.” He goes on to describe his interest in the eeriness and familiarity of the Doppelganger myth and how this could intersect with the economic environment of contemporary Ireland. “Observing how in the new Ireland of the Celtic Tiger, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, I thought this story would connect in interesting ways.”
Many Irish critics have resented Boorman’s harsh and cynical perspective of contemporary Ireland. Both in this film, and in previous works of his like the gangster drama The General (1998), he focuses on the grimmer aspects of Irish society. Where he had Brendan Gleeson play a notorious crime lord in The General, for The Tiger’s Tail he turns to real estate developers who are, in his words, “…ruthless, bending the law, [and] bribing politicians.”
One might be tempted to blame his film’s cold Irish reception on Boorman’s British origins. While that may make him seem like an outsider, wagging his finger at the faults of another’s society, he has actually called Ireland his home for nearly forty years. So the pains and inequalities that he portrays are ones that he witnesses himself. Furthermore, this harsh perspective is not just the result of distanced and removed armchair observations of modern Irish culture. Rather, Boorman spent much time learning even more about the poorer side of Irish society than he could otherwise have known from his own experiences. He recalls, “In my research for the film, I visited many homeless shelters and squats. Dublin is flooded with young people, mostly boys, who cannot afford accommodation and without an address, cannot find work.”
The private and political aspects of the film were close to Gleeson’s heart as well as Boorman’s. In addition to the broadening gap between wealth and poverty, Boorman laments the state of healthcare in Ireland. He remembers that at the time of making the film, “Brendan was mired in the horrors of the Irish health service with both his parents in and out of the hospital. He became an unofficial spokesman for people enduring the shameful inadequacies of the A&Es, [Accident and Emergency units] which, together with the ever swelling homeless, form part of the story.”
Still, even with all of this bitterness about the current condition of Ireland, Boorman maintains a certain twinkle about the whole situation. The film is, after all, as much a dark comedy as it is a thrilling drama. Perhaps Boorman summarizes it best when he says, “As we all know, for the last ten years Ireland has been on the greatest binge spending spree of all time and we know that sooner or later we will have to sober up and endure a horrendous hangover, but not yet, please not yet.”
~Carter Bruce, Dryden Theatre Volunteer
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