Liam Neeson is back in stylish Hollywood thriller “Marlowe”

Liam Neeson is back in the atmospheric 1930s-set crime caper “Marlowe,” based on the book by John Banville, a screenplay by William Monahan and directed by Neil Jordan (that also stars Colm Meaney).

Talk about an Irish fest – and how refreshing to catch a new movie that reminds us how they used to make them – which “Marlowe” certainly is. 

Set in Tinseltown in the 1930s, the story is based on “The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel” by celebrated Irish writer Banville, with a screenplay by award-winning Irish American screenwriter (of “The Departed”) Monahan and Jordan himself.

“Marlowe” begins with Irish American heiress Clare Cavendish (“Clare like the county,” she says) who is equal parts ravishing and deadly. 

Played by Diane Kruger, it’s clear from her first appearance there is far more to her than meets the eye, which world-weary gumshoe Marlowe (played by Neeson) intuits during their first consultation.

Cavendish reveals she has a no-good paramour named Nico Peterson (played by Francois Arnaud) who has gone missing. She’ll pay Marlowe handsomely to have him found.

What her real interest in this womanizing, ‘evil-incarnate’ player really is isn’t immediately obvious, but that pulls the audience in, as does Kruger’s all-electric screen presence. 

Film noir detective flicks have been a Hollywood staple since the days of Humphrey Bogart and in “Marlowe,” Neeson is a gumshoe for our own fraught times. Sensitive, smart, and impossible to hoodwink, he plays to his screen strengths in this wisecracking and world-weary role. 

Neeson’s Marlowe is an Irish immigrant and former World War One soldier in the Royal Irish Rifles. A former LAPD cop who’s lost his badge and taken up detective work, he has a reputation for solving the toughest crimes.

Diane Kruger as Clare Cavendish and Liam Neeson as hardbitten Irish Phillip Marlowe in “Marlowe.”

As Clare’s brilliant but untrustworthy mother, Jessica Lange plays former Hollywood it-girl Dorothy Cavendish, who is as familiar with the works of James Joyce as she is with the dubious machinations of Hollywood. 

Lange’s character has a toxic competition with her daughter for the attention of her Hollywood producer husband now about to be ambassador to the Court of King James. A former bootlegger who hit the big time, the Kennedy echoes are unmistakable, as is the suspicion of the rough work that undergirds his fortune. 

What director Jordan delivers is a hugely atmospheric and stylish period drama that pulls you in from the first frame. The skillful use of computer animation to bring to life 30’s Hollywood boulevards, the neons and billboards and passing motors, gives this film an authenticity that evokes its era artfully.

But it’s Neeson’s performance as a hardbitten detective that makes the film sing. He knows he’s getting too old for the kind of rough and tumble the job often demands but without his badge and pension what choice does he have? 

The scenes where he takes on the tough guys are convincing and often surprisingly funny. After he knocks one guy out he picks up a chair and shrugs “f—k it,” then breaks it over his back to keep him out cold. This kind of lived-in character note brings his “Marlowe” to life and makes you root for his good guy in a bad world persona.

The plot of the film has other plots concealed within its lines, of course. It turns out that the pronounced dead Nico Peterson is still very much alive, as Clare Cavendish suspects, and that the spider’s web of intrigue only builds from there.

Crime has always been the dark underside of the American Dream and this film takes a deep dive into the compromised lives and actions that support it. No one is a piece of virtue, but almost no one is entirely composed of, as Alan Cumming’s entertaining character Lou Hendricks calls it, “tarantulas.”

Instead, this L.A. is a fallen Eden, a place where innocence and promise curdle faster than milk in the sun and where wisecracking cops like Bernie Ohls (played by Colm Meaney) and Joe Green (played by Ian Hart) have had a belly full of seeing enough.

Liam Neeson as Hollywood Irish detective Phillip Marlowe in Marlowe

Liam Neeson as Hollywood Irish detective Phillip Marlowe in Marlowe

Jordan keeps things loose and funny – as well as unsettling – as the film unspools, focusing on the palm trees and all the neon-lit glory but reminding us how Tinsel town got made. “Why this is hell nor am I out of it,” says the wily ambassador, quoting Doctor Faustus, as Marlowe circles the dark web of deceit and murder that has helped build his empire.

For all its dark themes, the film is an unexpected romp. Yes, it’s assembled some of the most compromised and compromising people you will ever encounter, but there are exchanges between them that light up the screen.

When Marlowe grills country club impresario Floyd Hanson (played by Danny Huston, who is the image of his famous father, Irish American director John Huston) he says it must have been hard for him to witness Peterson’s mutilated body lying in the road. But Hanson replies, “I’ve seen men in more disarray than that in which Mr. Petersen was discovered,” adding that he’s a World War One veteran like Marlowe and says, “Once, after an artillery strike, I found a friend’s tooth in my whiskey glass. I drank the whiskey.”

“You’re a terrible man,” says Marlowe. “I needed the whiskey,” Hanson replies. This is the kind of noir-ish dialogue that we pay the money for and Monahan doesn’t disappoint.

It’s good to see Colm Meaney and Neeson mix it up onscreen again and they are well-met as two seen it all cops who stand on either side of the law but work together. As Bernie Ohls, Meaney quietly looks out for his former college and reminds us of the danger Marlowe puts himself in for a paycheck.

The story changes track multiple times as Marlowe progresses but it’s clear at all times who the most dangerous protagonists are. Some might grouse that the big reveal is undercut by the secondary characters, but that’s to miss the point here. The lines that aren’t ever crossed belong to the quietly un-buyable Irish detective, the one good man in an ocean of the unjust. 

“You’re a long way from Tipperary,” Marlowe says as he watches Dorothy Cavendish move through her unhappy world of great wealth and privilege. It’s a funny line but it’s also a reminder that Marlowe is very far from Ireland now himself, and the two Irish immigrants have taken very different and contrasting paths that tell the story in miniature.

The roles you play offscreen are as important as the ones you play on, “Marlowe” reminds us. So be careful not to get typecast or worse do it to yourself. In this film, the masks that people wear become their prisons. Only Marlowe himself emerges free in the end.

“Marlowe” is in theaters now.



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John Connors to host Craic Music Fest in New York this month

Actor John Connors has emerged as one of the most vital – and sometimes controversial – voices in Irish cinema. Agree or disagree with him, there’s no doubting his gift as a screen star.

Connors is back in New York next month at the 25 Craic Fest with his new film “The Black Guelph,” about how Ireland deals – and fails to deal – with its past.

But Connors will also be on site this month to MC the Craic Music Fest on February 24 at Rockwood Music Hall.

First, though, let’s start with his film: “The Black Guelph” is his hard-hitting drama about the way generations can unwittingly hand on trauma – and consequences – to the ones that follow them, but it is also a black mirror reflection of the kind of country that Ireland actually is. 

“The Black Guelph were a group of people in ancient Rome that wanted to uphold the power of the Pope, they were pope loyalists, and anybody went against them, The Black Guelph either massacred or banished them,” Connors tells IrishCentral, with the kind of follow the dots speaking style that can infuriate his critics.

“What we’re essentially saying,” he continues, “is that the Irish state and successive governments are The Black Guelph, because they protected the power of the church’s interests over time.” 

The film is set in the modern day, he continues. “We follow a young man called Carl who has drug addiction problems and who is selling drugs, and you see him as a bit of a thug, a bit of a gangster.”

Soon we settle into the assumption we watching a film about his struggles but then his father comes into the situation, the father who once abandoned him, and we get into his father’s story too. 

“Eventually audiences figure out that we’re actually watching a film about intergenerational trauma, but specifically about the effects of intergenerational clerical abuse, about how all that trauma gets passed on.”

It’s heavy subject matter, Connors is the first to admit. “But there has never been an Irish film that has carefully examined the intergenerational trauma arising from clerical abuse. It’s something we’ve avoided. Yet it’s such a massive problem in Ireland and I think it’s a big reason why we have so much drug addiction, alcohol addiction and so on. These are just the tools that people use to repress their emotions rather than to express themselves.” 

To be clear, did you say that the church colluded with the government to look after its interests, I ask? Is that what you believe?

“Absolutely and literally. Of course. That’s clearly what happened. And it was about protecting the institutions against the interests of the people. The Irish state has never acted in the interest of the people. Or at least not all the people. And I could still say that today,” he continues. 

“Instead it has always acted in the interests of the powerful elites, who are all attached to the big institutions. We are a small country. And the people who run the institutions are all friends that are all in the one club. And you know, we the ordinary people also definitely colluded with the church.”

Breakout Irish star Graham Early in The Black Guelph.

Recall that the last Magdalene Laundry in Sean McDermott Street was still open in Dublin until 1996, Connors reminds me. “And since then, there hasn’t been real justice. The redress system was set up in order to address the problems and grievances of abuse survivors, the physical abuse, the emotional abuse, and people were supposed to lodge a a claim and get money, but what would actually happen is that they’d have to go on the witness stand and be lambasted by the state’s solicitors and by Vatican employed barristers, or a combination of both.”

Lawyers would say the most unbelievably ugly things in the church’s defense, Connors said. “A disgusting thing is that they call the victims liars, and there are loads of public transcripts for this. A lot of people who went through that redress board system after taking the stand said they felt that they betrayed themselves and betrayed the rest of the survivors. And, you know, it was reliving the trauma for them all again and opening up all the wounds.” 

Connors’s new film goes into that system in what he calls “a very important and pivotal way” to show what it was all about “and how corrupt – and I would go as far as saying evil – that system was set up, and the redress board system, because it has to be been one of the worst things they did.”

It’s not all trauma and outrage onscreen, Connors adds. “There are so many beautiful things about being Irish. I think we’re great storytellers and great rogues. But that’s the veneer of Ireland, the storytelling and the charisma. Behind that that we repress so much, and there’s a real darkness to the place, and we all became experts in repression.”

He adds: “You know they say what isn’t said becomes a symptom. And that symptom can become a disease, and that disease can kill. I think what happened with the Catholic Church is a perfect example of that symptom. Some people didn’t want to talk and some people were silenced.”

“We don’t want to talk about the trauma, we don’t want to talk about what happened, we want to act like this was all ancient history, in prehistoric times. Because we’re still we’re still seeing the ramifications of all this trauma, all this unresolved trauma, we continue to see it. It’s getting passed down every generation and if you don’t resolve it there will be generations ahead that don’t even know where it came from.”

John Connors takes on the legacy of trauma in The Black Guelph

John Connors takes on the legacy of trauma in The Black Guelph

You can tell he is only getting started with his desire to hold the mirror up to his country. You can tell his screening and talkback at the Craic Fest will be a sell-out on the night. 

Meanwhile, he is also going to host the Craic Fest concert, which this year will be an exciting blend of music and standup. Previously he has performed his one-man show “Ireland’s Call” here, but this night will see his unscripted but always engaging stage presence emerge.

“I’ve been over five or six times now and I suppose I’m a part of the Craic Fest history. Terence Mulligan, the festival director, and I are now friends and I believe he is concerned for survival of Irish culture in America, which I think is really important. 

“I think the festival has influenced American culture in a very positive way, and probably shows the best of Irish and maybe left behind some of the bad stuff. So yeah, it’s the festivals 25 year anniversary and he asked me to come over and emcee the event. Obviously, there’s a great lineup of spoken word, people in comedy and songs so I said, why not? It’s a going to be a great festival!”

Slated to appear at the Craic Fest concert are comedians Siobhan Fallon, Katie Boyle, and Craig Geraghty alongside musician Brendan O’Shea and surprise guests!

The Craic Music Fest concert will be held at Rockwood Music Hall on February 24 at 7:00 pm. You can book your tickets online here. For more information, visit TheCraicFest.com



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