Terry George (2011)

Terry George, who won a Best Live Action Short Oscar for this thirty-minute piece, is best known as a screenwriter – In the Name of the Father, The Boxer, Hotel Rwanda – although he also directed the last of those three, among other feature films.  The main character in The Shore is Joe, who emigrated from Northern Ireland to America during the Troubles.  Decades later, he returns to his old home with his daughter Patricia.   These two don’t seem to have talked much in their lives together up to this point.  She has no idea her father is named after Paddy, Joe’s best friend from childhood, or that Joe had been going to marry a local girl called Mary, or that the events surrounding his departure for America ended his friendship with Paddy, who married Mary after Joe had gone.  (If you were brought up in America but your father still had a strong Irish accent, wouldn’t you be likely to ask him about his old life?)   Joe isn’t revisiting Ireland to renew old acquaintance with Paddy and Mary until Patricia urges him to.  In fact, it isn’t clear why he comes back to his native land, except to make happen what Terry George wants to happen.

All these years, Joe’s felt that the ruptured relationships with Paddy and Mary were his fault, that he betrayed them both.  When they meet again, it turns out that Paddy sees himself as the guilty party – for ‘stealing’ Mary from Joe.  All ends happily with friendships mended and the principal characters, who used to be in a band together, drinking and singing ‘Devil Woman’ (the Marty Robbins version – ‘I told Mary about us, told her about our great sin …’) with friends old and new.  George’s script is disappointingly sketchy and pat for a writer with his track record, even though The Shore has plenty of good-natured charm.   Paddy – disabled in a terrorist attack during the Troubles – is drawing unemployment benefit.  He and his mates almost literally scratch a living on the shore which Paddy and Mary’s cottage overlooks – looking for shellfish to sell and supplement their dole pay.  When Joe and Patricia arrive at the cottage, Paddy and the others mistake them for dole inspectors.   I found that a little of this supposed comic highlight of the film went a long way but Terry George and his cameraman Michael McDonough certainly capture the bleak beauty of the shore.   Conleth Hill’s acting as Paddy is much the most varied in The Shore although Ciarán Hinds, one of my least favourite actors, is much freer than usual and gives a good performance as Joe.   By contrast, Kerry Condon, fluid in This Must Be the Place, tends to telegraph Patricia’s emotions.  The cast also includes Maggie Cronin as Mary, Ruth McCabe as (I think) some relative of Joe’s, Anthony Brophy, easily eccentric as a mate of Paddy, and Patch Connolly, pretty wooden as a comical gravedigger.

20 March 2012