Nobody Move, This Is a Review: WHAT RICHARD DID

Richard Karlsen (Jack Reynor), the handsome young hero of Lenny Abrahamson’s What Richard Did (15A), is almost too good to be true. A schools rugby captain and the alpha male of his peer group in the leafy environs of south County Dublin, Richard is also thoughtful and sensitive, ‘the male equivalent,’ as one of his friends declares, ‘of the Rose of fucking Tralee’. Loosely based on Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day in Blackrock (2008), which was in turn inspired by the media coverage of the brutal death of a Dublin schoolboy at the hands - or feet - of his peers, What Richard Did is a character study of an intelligent young man who kicks his golden future apart in a moment of booze-fuelled jealous rage. It’s a thought-provoking film that offers its teenage protagonists no mercy as it pries into their intimate lives, but it’s refreshing too to watch a film that allows young men and women be who they are on their own terms - it’s a kind of Irish Less Than Zero (1987), in which the pretty young things prove to be pretty vacant when the first real stumbling block to their gilded passage through life drops out of the sky. Reynor is superb as Richard, an apparently effortless performance that grows impressively intense and anguished as he tries to come to terms with his tragedy, and he gets very strong support from fellow cast members Roisin Murphy, Sam Keeley and Fionn Walton. As if dazzled by Reynor’s performance, however, the filmmakers allow the true tragedy of the story to slip away - Richard is here the perpetrator, after all, rather than the victim - in favour of wallowing in persuasive but ultimately hollow existential self-questioning. Then again, this is a story that has its roots in the Me-Me-Me Celtic Tiger era, so perhaps focusing on Richard’s grief at the loss of his privileged existence is the most cutting satirical side-swipe at that benighted time Campbell and Abrahamson could have devised. ****

This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

More Power To His Elbow

Kevin Power’s BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK (2008) is a very fine novel, and one in the mould of Eoin McNamee in that it fictionalises a real-life event, getting under the skin of the newspaper headlines - and boy, were there headlines. In essence, the story Power tells is one of the Celtic Tiger’s cubs at lethal play, yet it prefigures the economic bust in the way it investigates how, in Ireland, your socio-economic position dictates how severely you will be punished if and when you transgress. Then again, what’s the point of being rich and powerful if you can’t bend the rules once in a while? Quoth the blurb elves:

On a late August night a young man is kicked to death outside a Dublin nightclub and celebration turns to devastation. The reverberations of that event, its genesis and aftermath, are the subject of this extraordinary story, stripping away the veneer of a generation of Celtic cubs, whose social and sexual mores are chronicled and dissected in this tract for our times. The victim, Conor Harris, his killers - three of them are charged with manslaughter - and the trial judge share common childhoods and schooling in the privileged echelons of south Dublin suburbia. The intertwining of these lives leaves their afflicted families in moral free fall as public exposure merges with private anguish and imploded futures.

  The excellent Irish director Lenny Abrahamson is currently filming BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK, which will appear on our screens next year as ‘What Richard Did’, courtesy of Element Pictures, whose most recent production was the black comedy ‘The Guard’. To wit:

Element Pictures are delighted to announce that Principal Photography begins this week on Lenny Abrahamson’s new film ‘What Richard Did’. Set in present-day Dublin, the story follows a group of privileged teens over the course of the summer after they leave school, focusing in particular on Richard, a popular sports star, whose life is changed forever after a senseless act of violence. ‘What Richard Did’ is directed by Lenny Abrahamson (Adam & Paul, Garage, Prosperity), written by Malcolm Campbell (Skins, Shameless), produced by Ed Guiney and executive produced by Andrew Lowe both of Element Pictures (‘The Guard’, ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’). It is loosely based on Kevin Powers award winning 2008 novel Bad Day at Blackrock. The film stars an ensemble of young Irish actors including Jack Reynor, Sam Keeley and Roisin Murphy as well as established talent including Lorraine Pilkington and Lars Mikkelsen (star of the Danish hit series, ‘The Killing’). The film will shoot in and around Dublin and Wicklow for five weeks and is backed by the Irish Film Board and Element Pictures.

  I’m looking forward to this one in a big way. Lenny Abrahamson made the best Irish movie of the last decade with the pitch-black comedy ‘Adam & Paul’, and it’ll be intriguing to see what he does with Power’s source material. We’ll keep you posted …