The Crying Game

That writer-director Neil Jordan’s film was a surprise hit rests largely on a literal surprise revealed about half-way into proceedings. It works as such but it is impossible to justify the film’s iconic reputation because of it.

Divided into three parts it deals with the story of Irish Republican Army volunteer, Fergus (Stephen Rea), who participates in the kidnapping of a black British soldier, Jody (Forest Whitaker), stationed in Northern Ireland.  They become friendly and Jody tells Fergus about his girlfriend, Dil (Jaye Davidson), and asks him to go and see her if he should not survive.  Jody is killed in an British Army raid on the IRA hide-out, Fergus escapes to London, where he duly looks up Dil only to become enamoured of her.  But the IRA find him and order him to kill a British judge in order to wipe the slate clean of the charge of failing his soldiery duties.

The first part of the film plays rather like a theatre piece as, largely confined to a small space, its builds the relationship between the two men, and establishes Fergus’s sympathetic nature.  Although in terms of setting, the film opens up in the middle section the primary concern is still with examining Fergus’s emotional vulnerability. However in the closing section Jordan, who won an Oscar for his screenplay, falls back on too many conventional strategies to resolve the plot and a coda is embarrassingly ill-judged, as musically naff as, in hindsight, is the Percy Sledge classic opener.  

Whilst one’s got to wonder why Forest Whitaker was cast as a British soldier (it’s not so much his accent as his thoroughly unsoldierly demeanour that fails to convince), Stephen Rea is a charmingly low key presence although, once again, one tend to wonder about his character's pliability. Much of the film’s reputation rests on the Oscar-nominated performance of Jaye Davidson a non-professional actor making his screen debut, who largely faded from view after this (he didn't win the Oscar but for my money he was a lot better than William Hurt's winning turn in 1985's Kiss of the Spider Woman). Jim Broadbent who to that time had largely appeared in television has an amusing role as a gay bar-tender.

FYI. The film’s title refers to a 1965 U.K. chart hit for Dave Berry in 1965 which was re-recorded for the film by Boy George with backing by the Pet Shop Boys.

 

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