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Breakfast on Pluto (2005)
Neil Jordan’s career is marked by an impressive number of risky
ventures. Perhaps none was more risky than refusing the siren call of Hollywood after
directing Tom Cruise in 1994’s Interview with the Vampire. Since The Crying Game had become the
don’t-spoil-the-twist ending sensation of 1992, it looked as if Jordan was poised to
become a hotshot expat director. Instead, he returned to his native Ireland to pursue a
list of smaller works that include 1997’s unheralded The Butcher Boy and 1999’s The
End of the Affair. But all to often his
films vary between heartfelt personal statements and bland treatises on celluloid, and
there’s never much certainty from project to project as to which Jordan is going to
show up.
At first glance, his newest film Breakfast
on Pluto looks like it’s in the former camp. The bad news is that it’s so
horribly misconceived and shoddily structured that its good intentions are worn out in the
first twenty minutes. The story centers on an orphaned boy (Cillian Murphy) who coltishly
styles himself as a cheeky cross-dresser to shock the local parish, whose head priest
(Liam Neeson) is his unacknowledged father. Patrick devises an alter ego named Kitten, the
better to vamp her/his way around swinging 70s Ireland.
The story is a total mess. Adapted, as was The Butcher Boy, from a Patrick McCabe novel, Jordan
sets Kitty’s story up as a fey picaresque, divvying up his journeys into an unending
series of chapter headings. (Each chapter in “St. Kitten’s” memoirs must be
about a page long.) To make matters worse, Jordan is drunk behind the wheel of this
material. There is a painfully unfunny post-Austin Powers Bond movie send-up, in which
Kitty knocks out the bad guys with snatches of Chanel, and not one but two hyper-stylized,
super slo-mo operatic sequences that play to the back row of the theater. Voice-over
narration pops up out of the blue around Chapter 21, and one scene takes place in a subway
car that is so completely modern, one wonders if the production design is there to test
whether or not anyone’s even paying attention by this point. Even the film’s
opening, which finds a pair of animated robins commenting on the action, seems to set the
tone for a none-too-hilarious mash-up of Mary Poppins and Velvet Goldmine.
Setting off in search of the mother who abandoned him, a woman who is a
dead ringer for Mitzi Gaynor, Patrick runs afoul of a campy gang of starry-eyed Hells
Angels, a gruff bear-cub (Brendan Gleeson) in an amusement park, and a traveling glam rock
band. (Kitty strikes up some man-on-man action with the band’s lead singer, but
despite loud vocalizations of her house-frau fantasies, the film is as shy to reveal
anything in the way of sex as a typical Hilary Duff vehicle.) Taking the long way round
Irish history, Jordan even bumps smack-dab into The Troubles at various points, with
Kitty’s boyfriend dumping him off in a lakeside trailer that doubles as a cache for
his gunrunning exploits. Ever the frustrating naif, Kitty chides the Republican heavies
for being “too, too serious.” With its faux-camp sensibility and kitchen sink
approach, it’s all too depressingly evident that Jordan agrees with his hero.
- Jesse Paddock
