Un hombre sin importancia

Starring Albert Finney as a deeply closeted gay man who is a bus conductor in 1960s Dublin as he endeavours direct a production of Oscar Wilde's play "Salome".

It boasts a great supporting cast of Brenda Fricker, Michael Gambon, Rufus Sewell, Tara Fitzgerald and Patrick Malahide.

A Man of No Importance is a bittersweet drama with no substance.

Set in a conservative world of Catholic Dublin in 1963. Alfred Byrne (Albert Finney) is a middle aged bus conductor who charms his passengers with poetry. He irritates the ticket inspector by covering up for passengers who did not pay for a ticket.

Bryne has an attraction for the new handsome young bus driver Robbie Fay (Rufus Sewell.) A pretty young woman Adele (Tara Fitzgerald) inspires him to attempt to stage Oscar Wilde's Salome with his ad hoc amaetur dramatics company.

Byrne's sister Lily (Brenda Fricker) always tries to set him up with a woman, not knowing that her bookish brother is a closeted homosexual.

The dim local butcher (Michael Gambon) wants the salacious and blasphemous play not to open in the church hall. He later torments Byrne.

Albert Finney gives a sensitive performance of a man for whom love and even close companionship has been elusive. Director Suri Krishnamma sets a wonderful tone with the period setting.

However the script lacks sharpness and is so sketchy with the story and characters. It actually wastes its cast.

There's a great deal of simple magic in this film, a loving, humorous community, a man with his mind on a project, mainly setting aside his own deepest desires - "Me arms are innocent of affection" - to try and bring joy to those around him, a handful of varied but mainly endearing characters (one of the few villains is actually pretty low-key). Tara Fitzgerald has the touching sweetness of an Emily Mortimer, even as her own simmering impulses are brought to light. Some of the incidents, given the overall theme of closeted homosexuality, are a tad predictable and overall the film often has the genial small town feeling of a modern BBC series like "Father Brown". But it is gently and warmly engaging.

In 1963's Dublin Alfred Byrne is a bus conductor who pleasures his working class passengers with poetry recitals as he punches their tickets. Head of a local theatre group, Byrne is inspired by meeting new passenger Adele Rice to drop his plans to do Importance of Being Earnest and instead go up with Salome. With the challenges to the material from those who would usually support him, Byrne also faces much more negative attention than he would usually like as various truths and secrets come out.

Although the plot does have some interesting aspects to it, it is hard to ignore how average a fist it makes of this story. The threads are there to be delivered and at its heart is Byrne, who is a complex character and one that could have been more interesting. Sadly Krishnamma cannot seem to bring this out of the script with any degree of sharpness. Although I get the idea of the mood and tone that the director was going for, the effect it has is to slow the film right down to the point where it crawls and is surprisingly unengaging. Visually the film has a nice feel of the period but the drab looks again tend to drag the film down a bit.

On paper the cast suggests that they can lift the material themselves but surprisingly nobody does and many of them deserved better. Finney's accent is pretty awful (which didn't help anything) and although he has a certain dignity befitting the character, and brings out some pain, he is never as convincing as he should have been. Fricker, Gambon, Sewell and Fitzgerald are mostly OK but they are given little to do in this film.

A fairly uninspiring affair then. There are things of interest in here but they aren't delivered that well and the film is surprisingly dull.

In once sense this comment is a response to some of the comments/reviews already posted here. Some reviewers were apparently looking for a message or statement from the film and felt disappointed. At times, I think the "message" can be secondary to the art of the actor or the filmmaker. Ironically, the main character in "A Man of No Importance" is passionate about "Art for Art's sake". Art doesn't have to have a point. Part of the art of this film is in the tapestry of colorful characters, wonderful dialog, and captivating performances. Albert Finney, Brenda Fricker, Michael Gambon, as one would expect from actors of their calibers, are completely convincing and real. Albert Finney's performance is perfectly calibrated, his character a combination of charming exuberance and subtly expressed confusion and loneliness.

It may be the director intended to put across a particular message about homosexuality, but to me it seems the real message and point to the film is the resilience of the human spirit throughout the experiences of isolation, loneliness, frustration, confusion, sadness, repression, etc. Attitudes about homosexuality in 1960s Dublin is one context in which to express this, but obviously it's a universal theme that can be played out in many settings.

The real challenge, and where this movie succeeds in spades, is in bringing humor, lightness, and real poignancy to the issue through a character one can genuinely like and relate to on so many levels. The credit for this is attributable to Albert Finney's brilliant acting in a film that is ultimately about the frailty and the endurance of one man, who could be any man.

One aside: the reviewer who liked the film but made the comment that it's unusual for Albert Finney to play a real person, must have not seen many of his films. Admittedly, he has often portrayed characters who are "bigger than life", but he can also quite effectively play ordinary people. I recommend the reviewer check out the following films: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Two for the Road, Charlie Bubbles, The Browning Version, Shoot the Moon, Rich in Love, The Playboys, Erin Brockovich, Gumshoe, The Run of the Country, Endless Game, Picasso Summer, and The Image.