Troubles

I first saw this years ago having picked up the DVD from a discount table, watched it, didn't really warm to it, then never gave it another thought. Having just recently viewed it again, I have a whole new perspective.

It is very well written (for the screen) by Charles Sturridge, an award-winning, accomplished child actor, writer and director, who later wrote and directed another favourite of mine, Longitude, amongst many other credits over a long and very successful career that is far from over.

Ian Charleson in the lead role (Major Archer) gives a subtle and sensitive performance in what appears to have been his final screen role. (He died in 1990, aged just 40). Ian Richardson as the likeably eccentric yet ultimately quite sinister Edward Spencer is another standout, with a very good quality supporting cast, including Emer Gillespie as the unreachable Sarah Devlin, and a young Sean Bean; a very different soldier from the one he would portray in the Sharpe films a few years later. There is is also a great ensemble of rather quirky characters that lend a human and personal perspective of the anxious last days of the privileged British in Ireland.

I have a feeling that this is a series that will improve again with each subsequent viewing.

Since neither of the previous reviewers quite obviously has not read the book on which it is based, something of a corrective is in order. Troubles, the book by Booker Award-winning author J.G. Farrell, indeed is disjointed at times and veers about from being comic, historic, satiric, quite sad at times, and altogether engaging. The hotel itself is an allegory of the British in Ireland, and Farrell (and the movie) seem to me to do a pretty good job of presenting that Troublesome situation with balance and historical dimension. As for the movie characterizations, they are most remarkably like, to my mind, those in the book, which is an unusual occurrence indeed. Richardson is magnificent, as would be expected, but all the other characters (and I do mean all) hew very closely to their literary models. They, as opposed to the reviewers (and how often is this the case!), took the trouble to read the book with some attention.

Set immediately after WWI and focusing gently around the troubles between the English and the Irish in Ireland, this layered saga rewards a viewer genuinely interested in the fate of its protagonist, the Englishman Major Archer (Ian Charleson). Major Archer's own mystifying and repeated "troubles" seem to eventually mirror the political troubles of British-occupied Ireland. And Ian Charleson gives a delicious performance that evokes just such an interest in his fate, no matter how eccentric his surroundings.

With Major Archer as the focus, this film makes wonderful viewing, as we see the British in Ireland through his eyes. And everything that happens to him, and the people around him, can also serve as metaphors of the times.

Major Archer's primary interactions are with a self-absorbed and outdated Englishman, Edward Spencer (played aptly by Ian Richardson) and his eccentric family, and a magnetic and coquettish Irish Catholic named Sarah (Emer Gillespie) whose charms Archer succumbs to. Sympathetic to the Irish cause, Major Archer has antagonists who are exemplified by the young and belligerently British Captain Bolton (Sean Bean). All three protagonists -- Charleson, Richardson, and Gillespie -- play their parts perfectly, and as the sprawling and multi-layered saga finally winds to a close, it feels moving and momentous.

This is Ian Charleson's last screen role, and a delightfully rich one. He plays the mild-mannered yet deep-feeling Major Archer with depth and with pitch-perfect affect. Lovely.

(Note: Americans and other non-Brits would do well to note that the term Sinn Féin is used frequently in the film; it is pronounced "Shin Fayne." This is the radical Irish Republican group, similar to the IRA. The slang term for the group is "Shinners.")