Flak Magazine: Review of Veronica Guerin, 10-17-03

The most interesting scene in Veronica Guerin — the new Jerry Bruckheimer-produced, Joel Schumacher-directed biopic — seems to be a throwaway one. Guerin (Cate Blanchett), an Irish journalist whose increasingly penetrating exposés of the Dublin drug underworld led to her assassination, is standing outside the pub with her editor and a fellow journalist. Ah sure, come on in and forget about all that, Veronica, have a drink and forget it, says one of them. No, says Veronica, and walks off.

In traditional Irish cinema — and, just as pertinently, in everyone else's cinema — Veronica, being Irish, would have gone in, downed a few pints and forgotten it all, in a welter of sure-isn't-Guinness-great schmaltz. But such alcohol-induced amnesia is not for Veronica, the Erin Brockovich of 2003. Maybe that's the point: Veronica Guerin trots out all of the "Oirish" tropes and confirms their legitimacy, but also shows how, in the midst of them, real — even heroic — lives are led.

Irish commentators (of which this reviewer is one) have often decried Irish films for parading the usual loveable Irish drunk stereotype, but they exist for a reason: The country's newspapers regularly throw hissy fits at the prevalence of teenage drunks kicking each other to death, and a Sunday morning walk through a Dublin awash with urine and vomit would convince any one that there is a dark side to its drink culture. Veronica Guerin shows admirable verisimilitude in neither overplaying nor denying Dubliners' pub-loving side. And it's the same story with the church. In bog operas of the old school, the characters would have spent hours wrestling Catholic guilt that's entirely absent in this movie. Nevertheless, the very first shot is of a church — Veronica's mother (Brenda Fricker) asks the priest to pray that her daughter loses her driver's license. It shows up again when Veronica tries to shrug off a death threat by recalling the empty threats made by various religious groups when she covered a story about the Bishop of Galway who, it was revealed in 1992, had fathered a child 17 years before.

You could call these references lazy attempts to include the old Irish clichés in a story that doesn't directly warrant them, but for a film about contemporary Irish society to blithely ignore the Catholic Church would be a stretch. Even with its massive loss of influence and power, the church in Ireland still has a vast cohort of weekly churchgoers and retains a sentimental, if not strictly observational, place in the hearts of many. The film's two references to the church highlight its position — on the one hand, a reference to one of the major scandals that helped diminish its power in Irish society, but on the other, a sense of the place it still holds in the life of many of the people.

This understated yet realistic look at everyday Irish life is the movie's best quality. As a thriller, it lacks something in that we all know what happens. (Guerin is murdered in the film's opening scene, with the story told in flashback.) Some have also objected to the film's portrayal of Guerin as a vigilante with a pen. She is explicitly trying to "get the bastards," and encourages a policeman (a composite of Guerin's real-life police sources) to help her by telling him that she can ignore the "laws that help the criminals." In the film's most harrowing scene, Guerin travels to the equestrian center run by John Gilligan (a genuinely menacing Gerard McSorley) and cheerily wanders into his house to ask him where he gets his money. Without a word, Gilligan beats her up. Viewers can certainly question her ethics and indeed wisdom at wandering onto someone's property uninvited and unaccompanied by even a photographer.

This plays into an aspect of the Guerin story the film doesn't address: After some elements of the Irish media canonized the late Guerin, political journalist Emily O'Reilly wrote a more clear-eyed look at her and, more to the point, the ethics of her paper, the Sunday Independent. The predictable media outcry at the "insult" to Saint Veronica was misguided. O'Reilly's book does show that a more critical view of Guerin is possible, but no one, including O'Reilly, has denied or tried to deny the fundamental truth about Guerin that makes her story so compelling: She was a journalist murdered for doing her job. Still, the movie would have been improved by questioning, rather than stoically celebrating, elements like the beating Guerin receives from Gilligan.

As in all such films "based on" a true story, there is much telescoping of action and characters. Similarly, much that in reality was murky and ambiguous is made clear and bright. By all accounts, Blanchett captures Guerin very well, including the aspects of her personality that were irritating and off-putting — one particularly sore point is Blanchett-as-Guerin's insistence that writing about anything aside from the Evil Drug Lords was a waste of time.

There's little spectacular or innovative about Veronica Guerin. It remains to be seen how well it will play outside of Ireland, although no doubt if Jerry Bruckheimer is involved it is hardly out of purely philanthropic concern. If the movie has any place in movie history, it's as a corrective to those mystical/drunken/loveable Irish stereotypes — not by ostentatiously setting out to correct them, but by simply telling its story.

— Seamus Sweeney (seamus.sweeney@campus.ie)