Irish reporter's tale gets tabloid treatment
As the slain Irish reporter Veronica Guerin, Cate Blanchett gives a breezy but steely performance. In the mid-1990s, Guerin fearlessly shook a nation awake with her filings on the social ravages of the drug world. Never mind that Blanchett is often, if not always, at odds with the tabloid of a movie she's starring in.
Of course, if you happen to be director Joel Schumacher and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, sensationally would do be the only way to tell her story. Not that "Veronica Guerin" is interested in her life. It tells the story leading to her death in 1996: the two years she spent relentlessly pursuing thugs for incriminating dirt to put in her column in Dublin's Sunday Independent.
"Pursuing" is my word, but the film presents Guerin as so heedless and unreflective in her crusade that it makes you believe she actively provoked her murder. There she is, tracking down possible bank robbers at the airport and heading brazenly into a sex den to talk up her most reliable source, Johnny Traynor (Ciaran Hinds, in the film's richest performance.) As written by Mary Agnes Donoghue and Carol Doyle, Guerin is often one trenchcoat and a single bad crime-scene joke away from being Jerry Orbach on "Law & Order."
The picture leaves it to Blanchett's zest to fill in the blanks, but the character's confidence is so impregnable that she must have the fear literally beaten into her. (A bullet through a window of her fortress of a home and the subsequent one in her thigh don't do the trick.) The man who roughs her up is money-laundering gangster John Gilligan (Gerard McSorley), who's using his sizable equestrian center as a cover. He appears to be the nexus of all the crime in Ireland, and the bull's eye of Guerin's investigation.
Oh, and in case you missed it from the aforementioned brutal encounter, he's also the movie's villain. Gilligan might have been the scum of the earth, but the film presents him as the laughable, seething core of evil. When he gets word that Guerin may be mentioning his name in an upcoming story, he blows up with curses and kicks his expensive-looking lawn furniture around.
Things rarely get more complicated than that. "Veronica Guerin" is a film that's big -- huge, in fact -- on reaction, but skimps at all times on contemplation. The reporter's peers don't take her seriously, but no one ever discusses why. She and her editor have a loving relationship, but based on what? Her mother (Brenda Fricker, wasted) dotes, and her brother Jimmy (Paul Ronan) and patient husband, Chris (Don Wycherley), try to get her to reconsider her aggression. But Guerin smiles them off, treating Chris and their small son, in one of the film's most galling moments, to a spinning, bouncing family dance that's set, predictably, to U2's "Everlasting Love."
It's easy to see what Schumacher and Bruckheimer were after in teaming up to tell Guerin's story: Oscars. And they've given the picture a Hollywood gloss. But the film is missing any sense of outrage or shock or politics, all of which writer/director Jim Sheridan brought to his indictments of the IRA, "In the Name of the Father" and "The Boxer." Even Steven Soderbergh's sunny lady-on-a-crusade dramedy "Erin Brockovich" showed some conviction.
"Veronica Guerin" hardly trusts you to follow its story, opening with the murder, then a series of titles that explain what's to follow. And whose idea was it to use a score jarringly reminiscent of the stuff in Steven Segal's movies or to have Schumacher's buddy Colin Farrell show up for a single inexplicable scene?
This is a self-congratulatory exercise in poor taste. Why toy with the film stock on the two occasions Guerin's been shot? Why photograph her dead body, rising heavenward, through the sunroof of her car? The movie seems as confident as its heroine only when it slips underground to the brothels and strip clubs. Seediness and violence are what really turn the movie on. Schumacher and Bruckheimer can't seem to help themselves. These are the same people who brought you such leering and lurid entertainments as "8MM," "Coyote Ugly," and television's "CSI." True to their natures, they've come up with an action flick passing as a eulogy.
Veronica Guerin
**
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
