The best Irish release of the year thus far in a year not exactly bursting with them Sweety Barrett is a heartwarming (though not charming) noir-ish modern morality tale shot in the less-than-picturesque town of Balbriggan, and infused with the toughness and harshness that has come to characterise the best of latter-day Irish cinema.
The film s human centre is provided by the finest home-grown actor currently in circulation Brendan Gleeson, fresh from his long-deserved breakthrough in The General, plays the hero of the title, a naove and simple giant who seems nowhere near cynical enough for the world he s living in, but whose decency always sees him through.
It s a role that fits Gleeson like a glove, but as he explains, it was also one of the more demanding roles he s taken on:
I was still trying to shake The General out of my head when I started rehearsing. I d talked about the movie for a year beforehand, and I d always fancied it, it was always going to be a really interesting part. But it s a very dangerous part, because there s a terrible temptation for an actor who s playing a simple man to indulge in lots of grimacing and beg for sympathy. Occasionally it s been done just right, but there s a general tendency to over-sentimentalise, and it s not just a Hollywood thing, you know?
I think the biggest danger for me was to stay outside of it, if you get me, he continues. With The General, you had the outside bits and you had to try and get inside. With this, I had the inside and I had to bring it out, and it was a question of how to do it. So I knew who he was from almost the beginning of reading the script, cause the writing was of such quality that you got it immediately.
The Sweety Barrett character is an endearing and unforgettable creation, a bit like one of those scruffy mongrel dogs that you don t really like but eventually end up warming to because he s so faithful, open and predictable. Sweety was shaped as much by Gleeson s particular sensibliity as by the directorial vision of first-time film-maker Stephen Bradley:
Well, we talked about it a lot. The kernel was there, we both agreed fundamentally who the character was, so there was an immediate click between me and Stephen in terms of that. After that, then, there were a lot of questions that had to be resolved just the tone of particular scenes, he would have to enlighten me about why he was taking a particular option, and I d do the same with him, and try to put forward any ideas that made sense. Especially the ending, which I don t want to give away too much but that confrontation with Liam (Cunningham, who plays a stunningly vicious and corrupt cop-cum-thug) at one stage, it gets fairly mad, jumping over tables, a big massive revenge deal, and we had to talk that through cos it seems almost too savage for the character he is. And did this discussion help when it came to filming the scene?
When it came to actually rehearsing it, I found that I still hadn t really got it, I still hadn t fleshed him out (laughing). I d fleshed him out physically all right, I d put on a fair bit of weight for The General anyway, the rounder the better. But I d fleshed out the flesh before the character how he walked, how he was, and the big pitfall is that you stay outside of him. He s a child, essentially, and it s impossible to look at a kid without smiling, and if I so much as smiled at Sweety I was finished, you know what I mean? It s not even a question of patronising the character intentionally, it s more a case of failing . . . (very thoughtful, intense pause) acting is like being, right, and you have to be the person.
So the obvious danger with this part is that if you re not truly in there, he continues. You start pulling very childish, vulnerable, oval faces, and you get into a deal where you re kind of watching yourself more than anything else. But the actual performance was deliberately brought down a key, I took the facial expressions down.
Everything could have been so schmaltzy. See, the great thing about having Dylan was that he reminded me constantly of how serious it is to be a six-year-old boy, and how his problems are as major to him as anybody s are to anyone. He s the centre of his universe, any of his concerns are very real, and that seemed to help me a lot.
Gleeson is effusive in his praise of all connected with the making of Sweety Barrett, but particularly Liam Cunningham, who plays his bete noire (bent cop Mannix Bone) as a vicious, violent, poison-blooded bastard who would have been perfectly at home in Irvine Welsh s Filth. Cunningham s performance is astonishing, and the mere recall of it prompts Gleeson into near-manic laughter:
This is why I love working here, above all else. Cos the people you work with there s a feedback there. (pause) Democracy is a dangerous term in acting, cause you need people to have a certain amount of control, and up to a point you have to have a certain autocracy whereby whoever s in charge is enabled to express their vision, you can t do it by committee or sit on some panel. But there s definitely some special sort of teamwork like me and Liam had it sussed out.
What Liam was doing was because Sweety was the epitome of innocence, he very deliberately made Bone the complete opposite, and he really went for it. He at no stage tried to elicit sympathy for this guy, he just said right, ok, you re good, I m evil . It was great fun, obviously, for him, this vicious Flash Harry cop type, but it was also a very generous thing from where I stood. The more evil he was, the more good and appealing Sweety appeared. The good and evil of each character was exactly defining the opposite, while still keeping each other within the bounds of credibility, so that they don t just become token figures. They are larger than life and they are the forces of good and evil and all that kind of deal. There is a slightly bizarre, fantasy scenario going on, it s almost like a Western. n
Sweety Barrett goes on release Friday April 16th