Barton sees the emergence of a vibrant, outgoing homegrown film industry over the last decades as an essential counterbalance to the international cinema that has used Ireland as a stage setting with grass. “I don’t know that we are as sensitive as we used to be to Stage Irishness, since we now produce our own renowned films that reflect our society as it is, and speaks to us in our own voices, but there are some egregious Oirish stereotypes that deserve special mention.” She is quick to name the film she believes to be the worst offender. “The 1937 Will Hay comedy Oh, Mr Porter! might be almost forgotten now but it was a smash hit in its day and is just a succession of impossibly clumsy clichés” she says, adding that the depiction of the Irish as wily peasants in Far and Away, garrulous ne’er-do-wells in Snatch (2000) and conniving hucksters in Waking Ned (1998) all fell into the same reductive traps set decades before.
And if the Irish haven’t been playing windswept hunks or twinkling alcoholics, they have been seen pulling on balaclavas and planting bombs. The painful history of the Troubles and how it has been clumsily represented in Hollywood is a complex subject, but Barton says particular mention should go to the 1994 thriller Blown Away, in which Tommy Lee Jones portrayed a crazed Northern Irish bomber with an especially indecipherable, tongue-twister accent and a limited understanding of his own political aims. The film, a modest success, was part of a benighted 1990s subgenre of thrillers centred on Irish terrorists that included Sean Bean in 1992’s Tom Clancy adaptation Patriot Games, repeat accent-offender Brad Pitt in The Devil’s Own (1997) and a slow-blinking Richard Gere in the same year’s The Jackal.
Grennell doesn’t feel the need to list the advances the Irish film industry has made in recent decades in bringing a more realistic portrayal of a multi-faceted Ireland to international audiences. “If I had to do a roll call, we’d be here all day,” he says. “The short version is that Ireland now punches well above its weight in global film: in acting, in writing, in directing, in music, and in all the technical aspects of cinema production. We’ve just chosen Tomás Ó Súilleabháin’s Arracht, a hard-hitting Irish-language film about the Great Famine of the 1840s, to represent us at next year’s Academy Awards. For 99% of the world Arracht will be a foreign language film so accent and dialect are immaterial. If the film is going to mean anything to an international audience it has to work emotionally. Wild Mountain Thyme is a very different proposition but it must make the same connection if it’s going to stop us from laughing at it, and make us laugh with it.”
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