Blarney Stoned

Full-blown blarney explodes into the mean streets of New York in the 1990 film State of Grace. With lots of good material about saloons, religion, angels, mom, brothers in arms, cops, the old neighborhood, brawls, and what an incredible prick Dad was, not to mention a shootout that takes place on St. Patty's Day, State of Grace pulsates with blarney of a truly spectacular nature. And doesn't Sean Penn speak for an awful lot of Irish-American criminals when he explains his lifestyle by saying: "We drink. We shoot people"?

Yup, that about covers it.

Blarney goes to Beantown in the 1994 film Blown Away, where Jeff Bridges plays a Boston bomb expert who, we discover, innocently got involved with the IRA as a youth, something that is not that easy to do. Now, back home in Boston many years later, he has to match wits with his mad bomber mentor of long ago, a sadistic lunatic played with demonic glee by the ubiquitous Tommy Lee Jones. With its daunting brogues, Gaelic subtitles, Beantown bars, characters named Liam and the pipes, the pipes, Blown Away has an amazingly high quotient of blatherful blarney. A tip of the old tam-o'-shanter to all those involved.

Students of blarney who have borne with me this far must naturally be assuming that I plan to wrap up this article by anointing either Finian's Rainbow or Far and Away as the biggest crock of blarney ever. Sadly, I must disappoint them. Finian's Rainbow is a 1968 motion picture about a leprechaun in the rural South. I don't want to talk about it anymore. As for Ron Howard's 1992 miscue, yes, Far and Away is a hypnotically bad movie, covering all the bases with the Chieftains, the pipes, duplicitous brothers, canny locals, a redheaded vixen named Shannon, brawling boxers, craven landlords and courageous immigrants. Alternately cocky and stupid, a mix that doesn't quite work, Tom Cruise turns what could have been A Few Good Irishmen into a 19th-century Top Gun, and does not even come close to matching the epic blarnifulness of Victor McLaglen.

But Ed Burns does. Yes, the surprise winner of the Golden Blarney Award is Ed Burn's small, charming, canny film The Brothers McMullen, a movie laden with blarney of such a bathetically radiant quality that St. Patrick must be turning in his grave. In what we must assume was a calculated attempt to surpass The Informer for pure tonnage of blarney, Burns seems to have made an exhaustive checklist of every cliché about people of Irish descent and then jammed everything on the list into his film.

The film opens with a funeral scene (classic blarney), then features a conversation where the main character's mother says she is going back to Ireland to marry the man she should have married 35 years earlier, having spent the past three-and-a-half decades living with a drunken bum who beat his sons. In other words, in the very first minute of the film, Burns assaults his audience with blarney blasts of truly thermonuclear dimensions. And it just keeps getting better. You want pipes? You got pipes. You want long-winded conversations about the Church's stand on abortion? You got long-winded conversations about the Church's stand on abortion. You want seductive, hot-blooded ethnics trying to seduce good Irish boys? Use of Catholicism as an excuse for every adult personality dysfunction? A soundtrack by a guy named Seamus? A loving mother? Guilt, guilt, guilt? You got 'em all. Not a single character in The Brothers McMullen can toast a piece of bread, turn on a light switch or go to the bathroom without putting on a Notre Dame Fighting Irish sweatshirt and grabbing another bottle of Guinness. Watching this movie for almost two hours is like having the entire St. Patrick's Day Parade rumble through your medulla oblongata.

And so, when all is said and done, there can be no doubt that the biggest load of blarney of all time is Ed Burns's tale of mopey, self-pitying Irish-American losers out in some dump on Long Island. The one-stop shopping center for every bit of crap ever written or said about the Irish, The Brothers McMullen beats The Informer hands down.

In a way, it is sad that the biggest load of blarney should have been made by an American rather than by someone from the Old Sod, but in a sense this is what every Irish immigrant to America came here to achieve. Ireland is a wonderful country, a lovely country, a country filled with wee canny folks with a touch of the poet in their hearts. But if you really want to be in the horseshit business, you have to go to Hollywood.

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Joe Queenan reviewed Va Va Voom!: Bombshells, Pin-ups, Sexpots and Glamour Girls in the July '96 issue of Movieline.

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