Jim Sheridan (1997)
BFI’s screening of The Boxer was followed by a Q&A with former world featherweight champion Barry McGuigan, who served as ‘boxing consultant’ on Jim Sheridan’s film and as personal trainer to its star, Daniel Day-Lewis, during his lengthy preparations for the title role. McGuigan, according to Geoffrey Macnab’s Sight and Sound review (March 1998), was ‘suitably impressed with Day-Lewis’ talent in the ring’. I didn’t stay for the Q&A, but that ‘suitably’ says a lot. Sheridan’s protagonist, Danny Flynn, is more than a boxer but it’s clear from an early stage of the film that convincing as a boxer is what Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance is all about.
Danny Flynn was still a teenager when he went to prison for (unspecified) offences relating to his involvement with the Provisional IRA. Fourteen years later, in 1994, Danny is released and determined to go straight; he’s also had enough of the sectarian violence endemic in his home city of Belfast. Before his prison sentence, Danny was a promising boxer and in a relationship with a local girl, Maggie Hamill. Soon after he went to prison, she had a child with another IRA man, and they married; her husband then went to jail and is still inside. Maggie (Emily Watson) is obliged by the IRA code to remain faithful to her husband, but it’s plain to see, as soon as Danny tries to renew contact with her, that Maggie still has feelings for him. On his first night of freedom, Danny sleeps in a shabby hostel, where he bumps into Ike (Ken Stott), his old boxing trainer, now an on-the-skids alcoholic. Before long, Danny and Ike, on the wagon, have joined forces to revive a non-sectarian boxing club in the city.
The main supporting characters in The Boxer, written by Terry George and Sheridan, represent key political positions. Maggie’s father, Joe (Brian Cox), the local IRA chief, is now willing to negotiate peace terms. Angered by Joe’s readiness to compromise, his lieutenant Harry (Gerard McSorley), who refuses to give an inch, is an increasingly reluctant sidekick. Harry’s also infuriated by Danny’s change of heart, vividly reflected in his disposal of the cache of explosives he comes across while refurbishing the place where he and Ike will run their club. (Danny chucks the cache in the river.) Harry’s wife (Eleanor Methven), given little to say, is thereby the epitome of activists’ wives during the Troubles, mutely but uneasily loyal to their politically fanatical husbands (Troubled women …) Maggie’s son, Liam (Ciarán Fitzgerald), seeing his mother and Danny embrace, is so incensed that she’s betraying his father that he sets fire to Ike and Danny’s boxing-club premises.
The Boxer’s evolution in relation to the precarious peace process developing in Northern Ireland in the mid-1990s is interesting. The film’s action takes place around the time of the first IRA ceasefire of the decade, which began in August 1994 and remained in force – officially, at least – until February 1996. Jim Sheridan, presumably intentionally, avoids mentioning by name or using news film of real-life politicians of the era. In the film’s climax, with Harry on the point of murdering Danny, the IRA hardliner’s henchmen (David Hayman and others) turn against him; it’s Danny, not Harry, who survives – a signal of the waning power of Harry’s mindset in Northern Ireland’s civil war. By the time The Boxer was being prepared for release, the IRA had declared a second ceasefire, effective from late July 1997 and still in place at the time of the following year’s Good Friday Agreement. The Boxer had its world premiere in the US in the last week of 1997 and its Irish premiere in the first week of February 1998 (it opened in Britain later that month). A series of unidentified yet unmistakable voices – Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Ian Paisley, Gerry Adams – is on the soundtrack during the opening titles. This would certainly have succeeded in underlining the film’s urgent topicality, but it sits oddly with the anonymising of politicians in Sheridan’s main narrative.
Despite the importance of the political context and themes deriving from it, The Boxer is not a good film. This third and last collaboration between Jim Sheridan and Daniel Day-Lewis isn’t a patch on either of its predecessors, My Left Foot (1989) and In the Name of the Father (1993). It’s in relation to the latter that The Boxer’s failure might seem more surprising. It’s true that In the Name of the Father, unlike The Boxer, dramatises an autobiography, but both have IRA-related political violence at their centre, and Terry George and Sheridan share the screenplay credit on the two films. A crucial difference is that The Boxer attempts to fuse political, romantic and sporting drama. It doesn’t satisfy as any one of those movie genres, let alone integrate them. The music for the film, by Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer, is a persistent reminder of this ambition and falling short. It doesn’t help that the dialogue tends to purplish cliché (Danny to Maggie: ‘I’ve lived with your face in silence for fourteen years – it’s hard to talk to the real you’; Maggie to her father – ‘My marriage was over before Liam was even born … I’m the prisoner here. You and your politics have made sure of that …’). It doesn’t help either that Daniel Day-Lewis’s heart doesn’t seem to be in either the political or the romantic aspect of the story.
This is where we came in. Some illustrious American actors have played boxers on screen – William Holden (Golden Boy), Kirk Douglas (Champion), Paul Newman (Somebody Up There Likes Me) and, especially, Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. Even though he can’t hope to emulate De Niro here in the physical transformation department, you can see the appeal, for a notorious perfectionist like Daniel Day-Lewis, of turning himself into the genuine article for The Boxer. He’s completely credible in the fight sequences. In production notes on the film, included (with Geoffrey Macnab’s S&S piece) in the BFI handout, Barry McGuigan is quoted as follows: ‘I can say that [Daniel] could fight, right now, any of the top ten in the country. If I’d had him at 19, I would’ve made a world-class fighter of him’. That may be music to Day-Lewis’ ears – authoritative confirmation of mission accomplished. Film audiences are more likely to think, so what? Daniel Day-Lewis is an actor, not a boxing pro. He doesn’t need to be that good at boxing to be credible in the role of Danny Flynn, who doesn’t always win and presumably isn’t meant to be a top-notcher.
Outside the gym and the ring in The Boxer, Day-Lewis gets by on screen presence yet seems to be going through the motions. He leaves space in the spotlight for a collection of supporting actors who aren’t naturally inclined to stay in the background. Brian Cox and Gerard McSorley, to be fair to them, do decent work though both are very aware of the political significance of their roles. Ken Stott is a different matter. Among the main characters in the story, Ike has the least explicit political significance. He’s also given the most dramatically colourful (though also conventional) opportunities. Ken Stott sees his chance and seizes it in a big way: the result is bravura overacting. Stott is striking to begin with, chiefly because, in his early forties, he was so slim compared with his older self. But Ike’s rapidly melodramatic ups and downs – from the down-and-outs hostel to a new lease of life to alcoholic relapse after the boxing club burns down – become borderline comical. It’s only when he becomes a corpse that Jim Sheridan manages to rein Ken Stott in.
A much better contribution comes (in a minor role – in terms of screen time) from another Celtic actor not normally averse to getting himself noticed on screen. Ian McElhinney plays Reggie Bell, a senior, politically attuned RUC man, and expresses admirably the officer’s professional bonhomie. Bell donates equipment to the boxing club. Leaving the place at the end of a successful grand re-opening event there, he’s blown up in his car (the work of Harry’s team). The scenes immediately before the assassination are among the film’s strongest. The club is non-sectarian but that still means Protestant vs Catholic bouts in the ring. Jim Sheridan conveys the vigorous tribal preferences of the ‘mixed’ crowd watching the fights. The scenes of civil disturbance that follow Reggie Bell’s assassination are well staged, though verging on excessive. The whole of this part of the narrative, though, is far superior to a fortunately brief episode describing Danny’s excursion to London to fight (arranged by a Belfast-based Cockney fixer, played by a wasted Kenneth Cranham). The sequences at a swanky private boxing club in London are crudely Anglophobic from start to finish. It’s almost a relief to return to the louring bleakness of Belfast, which Chris Menges’ cinematography captures powerfully.
Ironic that, in a film with an overwhelmingly male cast and which describes a culture in which women’s needs are overlooked, the best performance comes from Emily Watson. It was impressive to see Watson, so soon after I’d watched again her big breakthrough in Breaking the Waves (1996), build, in what was her next but one cinema appearance, such a finely-controlled screen portrait – especially since Maggie’s not a great role, and Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t give her enough to play off in their scenes together. Emily Watson’s Maggie stands out from almost everyone in The Boxer: her character often comes across as an individual rather than the embodiment of a political attitude.
14 April 2026
