Maidgethma Wonderfully offbeat film!

Palaest recommended

RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Robert Joyner The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

owckerry In 1959 an unsolved murder case in Kerry took an unusual twist. The previous November a bachelor farmer named Maurice Moore had been found strangled to death. It says a lot about the distance between community ritual and forensic investigation at the time that, the evening his body was discovered in a ditch, a wake was held in Moore's home in Reamore, at which visitors roamed freely through his house. The following day detectives from Dublin arrived to fingerprint the house. "The whole place could have been found guilty," one local joked.Actually, there was just one suspect. Moore had been due to appear at Tralee Circuit Court a month later after a boundary dispute with his neighbour, Dan Foley. Moore had already told the Garda that Foley had begun to follow him home at night. Photographers camped outside Foley's home in the expectation of seeing him led away in handcuffs. He never was.With insufficient evidence against Foley the case had gone cold the following year when the bishop of Kerry, Dr Denis Moynihan, made an extraordinary plea for information. For leverage he decreed that crimes connected to land disputes were now "reserved sins" in the parishes of Ballymacelliot and Tralee, meaning that only he and his deputy could absolve them. This was a sort of good cop-God cop routine: come forward or risk damnation. It was, as one person described it in Gus Smith and Des Hickey's book, John B: The Real Keane, a frightening development. "It was the kind of extreme action that struck fear into the people of these parishes." And still nothing.Were there any justice in the world John B Keane would never have written The Field, a play about a world without any justice. (A 50th-anniversary production is playing at the Gaiety in Dublin.) The events inspired Keane to write the drama of Bull McCabe, a fearsome tenant farmer whose plans to fix an auction for the field he has long farmed are scuppered by an outside bidder, and whose fatal retaliation holds consequences for his village, his besieged conscience and the frustrated law of God and man.Can the dramatisation of unsolved crimes and miscarriages of justice bring closure? Keane had his own qualms of conscience when writing the play. It was produced, finally, seven years after the events that inspired it, and a few years after Foley himself had died an isolated and shunned man, still protesting his innocence. (His nephew John Foley has continued to defend him and is quoted in a new programme note by Billy Keane, John B's son.) There is an agony in such immortality; to never be found guilty, to never be found innocent, to be eternally on trial.Something strangely similar happened with a new play by Peter Gowen that recently concluded a national tour. The Chronicles of Oggle, a solo performance, is a history of dispossession and abuse in a priest-ridden Ireland whose details are depressingly familiar. So much so, in fact, that Gowen's play reads like a formula.His protagonist, Pakie, moves quickly from his home to the beatings and molestations of a Christian Brothers industrial school and then into an adulthood of resistance and divided communities. But it is also based on a true story, that of a childhood friend who died by suicide in his late 30s after a life scarred by sexual abuse.The "Oggle" of the title is a not-so-veiled reference to Gowen's native Youghal, where the play premiered in 2013. Shortly before it was due to return to the town for the tour, though, its dates were cancelled by the local promoters, who cited complaints from "unnamed sources".That may sound like censorship or a publicity boon – the story became part of the production's marketing material – but either way it lends heft to Pakie's distinction between a singular observer and a timid community: "Two eyes sees all. Ten thousand eyes sees nothing." All of this made it fascinating to read, in these pages, about the musician Cormac Breatnach's intention to make a stage performance based on the wrongful conviction of his brother, Osgur, for the 1976 Sallins train robbery. My colleague Peter Murtagh's article described it as "something of an exorcism" for Breatnach, whose formative years were affected by the miscarriage of justice.Theatre deals with conflict, with trauma and, ideally, with catharsis: you plunge into the depths in order to resurface, with luck, feeling shaken but cleansed. But theatre is ill equipped to bring much of anything to a conclusion. When Donal O'Kelly's play Ailliliú Fionnuala imagined the trial of an oil executive behind the Shell Corrib gas project in Rossport it seemed like wishful thinking for protesters, a reminder that any real-life reckoning was just a pipe dream. The laws of theatre are curious things, endlessly argued.To imagine something may be the first step to bringing it into being, but to witness a fantasy of justice in an unaccountable world seems like simple, perhaps dangerous, placation. It's hard to stage a conflict resolution. An audience in Youghal, for whatever reason, can always look away. After more than half a century a murder suspect is still in the dock. Understand the People, the history, the way of life at the time. this movie shows some of the way we had to life, whether right or wrong . . as an proud Irish person (sometimes we fu** up too) i am not proud of some of our past ' governments,the Catholic church,starvation, but it is our pain, it makes us who we are, Brave movie to make in Ireland .

Robert J. Maxwell It's a small, taut, tragic story of Richard Harris, as Bull McCabe, a sclerotic Irish patriarch who plans on buying at auction the grassy field that he and his family have worked on (and died on) for many years. The land is owned by a widow, however, who has been harassed by Harris and his son, Sean Bean, and is determined to see that the McCabe's don't get it. When a wealthy American (Tom Berenger) shows up, interested in building a cement highway across the field, and harnessing the local waterfalls for hydroelectric power, it certainly looks like McCabe isn't going to get it.Well, McCabe gets it, but not before he accidentally beats Berenger to death and hides the body. It costs him everything he has -- whatever peace of mind he had, his money, his son, his status in the church, his friends, his cattle, and finally his sanity. He who has been virtually running the village, snarling out gruff orders to others, now runs wild, alone, stampeding his cattle over a cliff and onto the rocks below, ranting and screaming like Lear on the moor, driving his son over the cliff as well. After this, still bellowing, McCabe wades out into the sea to his death.Richard Harris does a bang-up, pretty much overwrought job in this role, which was his last. He looks like Michelangelo's sculpture of Pope Julius II, with his remaining gray hair like an unruly coxcomb atop his head and this beard of Biblical proportions. It's the kind of performance that cries out for an Academy Award nomination. Harris got the nomination but didn't win. It was a depressing story about the small-minded people of an Irish village in the 1930s, flailing about in the rain and mud. Not a big star in it. Who needed it? Though, come to think of it, James Coburn won an award for a similar dramatic role after a similar lifetime career playing support or leads in routine movies. Coburn was good in "Affliction" but Harris does a better job with a more complex role here.Well, I wasn't surprised that Harris didn't win, nor did I particularly care. Movies about feuds over a plot of land usually don't win Oscars. Usually the awards go to far better films, films with artistic content that illustrate the human condition, thoughtful and challenging films that carry a great deal of philosophical weight -- "Titanic" and "Pearl Harbor," for instance.If nothing else, "The Field" is a corrective to fairyland presented to us in "The Quiet Man." Having said that, can I still recommend seeing this movie? Not only is Richard Harris great in it, but so is just about everyone else, including John Hurt as a semi-retard, Sean Bean as the sensitive son, Tom Berenger as the not-insensitive rich American, and a host of nameless supporting players.Yes, it is a small movie about a small thing. But small things can carry stones of symbolic weight. A slap in the face is a small thing.

bkoganbing Tenant farmers in Ireland and their problems accounts for some of the great political movements in that country. So it was interesting to learn that in The Field those problems have not gone away even though it's not British who are absentee landlords.Shot mostly in County Galway in Ireland, The Field certainly has the look and feel of The Quiet Man, but it's hardly in the same lighthearted spirit. In fact the priest in this film functions more like Karl Malden's priest of the docks in On The Waterfront.Richard Harris has been a tenant farmer working the land for widow Frances Tomelty for years and has raised his family there. It's pretty much accepted by the villagers that it's Harris's land by right of sweat so when the widow wants to sell no one bids against him except Harris's sidekick John Hurt. But American Tom Berenger doesn't know the rules around there and he does bid.But what Berenger wants to do is develop the place, put some Americanized shopping mall there. Imagine a strip mall on some of that beach-front property that John Ford so lovingly photographed in The Quiet Man and you can understand the feelings there. It all leads to a lot of tragedy.Originally Harris was supposed to play the priest role that Sean McGinley had and who played it well. The lead was to go to Ray McAnally who had done this role on stage. When McAnally died, Harris was moved up to the lead and responded with an Oscar nominated performance for Best Actor. Harris lost that year to Jeremy Irons in Reversal of Fortune.Also look for some nice performances here by Sean Bean as Harris's son and Brenda Fricker as his wife. All part of a very violent household.Religion specifically the Roman Catholic Church takes a beating and The Field does touch on the conservative role of the church in society. It's a generally accepted fact that the Church did its level best to discourage revolutionary activity during the 19th century after the Irish lost their parliament in the Wolfe Tone rebellion. Harris and others in the film comment about how no priests died during the potato famine that they don't know how the tenant farmers live. And Sean McGinley as the village priest is by no means portrayed as a bad man. There's also bad feelings towards Berenger who is seen as the descendant of people who cut and ran during the Irish troubles. Of course if a lot hadn't emigrated to all points of the globe, there would be a lot more trying to share the land that Harris wants to hold on to. The Field is a fine drama about Ireland and the problems there that may not have been totally resolved with independence.

futures-1 "The Field": Starring 1990 Oscar Nominee for Best Actor Richard Harris, Sean Bean, John Hurt, Brenda Fricker, Frances Tomelty, and Tom Berenger. This is the stuff of the Epics. Think novels with the Hugeness of Vision by Thomas Hardy, John Steinbeck, or Herman Melville; the Tales of the Greeks or Shakespeare; and the operas of Wagner. HUGE visions. All of this is hidden in a little story about an Irishman who rents a 3 acre plot of land? It only stays hidden for so long. Richard Harris is fantastic as an aging man who feels disconnected to all but "his" beautiful, green, beloved (leased) plot of land, which was worked by his father before him and his father before him. Alas, his son (Sean Bean) seems hesitant to carry it on. If that isn't bad enough for a man who sees nothing as more important than tradition and love for the land, along comes an American (Tom Berenger) with a whole new idea for this property, and soon makes the legal owner an offer of purchase. The little story becomes bigger – then Bigger – and BIGGER – all the way to HUGE. It has a straight-ahead, linear movement that not only seems to imply warnings, but unstoppable Karma. Like all good Epics, it is full of lessons – about vice, virtue, evil, wisdom, warnings, tragedy, potential redemption, and reminders about what is good & bad, right & wrong, fair & unfair. You'll also love the landscapes.