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Too much of everything

Powerful

Beautiful, moving film.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This is a review of "The Miracle", "The Brave One" and "Mona Lisa", three films by director Neil Jordan.Released in 1991, "The Miracle" stars Niall Byrne as Jimmy, a teenager living in coastal Ireland. Jimmy spends his days wandering about town, inventing fantastical personal histories for the various strangers who catch his eye.Jimmy's fantasies spiral out of control when he meets Renee (Beverly D'Angelo), a stylish older woman. Jimmy stalks Renee, visits her at the theatre houses at which she works, and becomes increasingly infatuated with her; he's in love. These desires quickly become perverse, untenable and then collapse, the film eventually revealing that Renee is in fact Jimmy's mother.The majority of Jordan's films clash fairy tales and fantasies with a "reality" that is squalid, criminal and perverse. Rather than clear cut demarcations between "fantasy" and "reality", however, Jordan finds the fairy tale conventions lurking within crime narratives, and finds the crime conventions lurking within familiar fairy tale narratives. Elsewhere his characters are often unable to be together thanks to national, sexual or biological differences which make romance impossible. Filled with fantasy objects who are revealed to be different genders, species (vampires, werewolves, mermaids etc), incestuous relatives, homosexuals or transsexuals, Jordan's objects of affection are almost always off limits.For most of its running time, "The Miracle" is beautifully unhurried. Low-key, atmospheric and filled with interesting sea-side locales, the film unfolds like a noirish dream, complete with stalking sequences evocative of Alfred Hitchcock's "Veritgo". Unfortunately the film's relaxed approach eventually gives way to much uninteresting Oedipal melodrama.Similar to "The Miracle" is Jordan's "Mona Lisa". Released in 1986, the film stars Bob Hoskins as George, an ex-convict who is hired to ferry a call girl, Simone (Cathy Tyson), around London. Though they initially feud, George quickly becomes infatuated with Simone, and begins to see himself as her guardian angel, her white knight, her lover. Simone nurses these fantasies, but eventually reveals that she is in fact not attracted to George; she's homosexual."Jordan's use of the fairy tale is not a correction or parody of their supposedly outdated values," writer and professor Carole Zucker once wrote, "rather, he investigates what it means to listen to fairy tales, what it means to trust narrative and what it means to follow their paths. His films often show the messy results of fairy tales, the awkward ways in which we interact with our shared store of narratives and the complex interrelation of past and future that make fairy tales such vivid material for impassioned pastiche." We see this in "Mona Lisa", as George imposes upon Simone a fairy tale that she shares, allows and secretly wishes to make real. Together the duo warp London – a perverse hell-hole filled with shadowy spaces, monsters, prostitutes and violence – turning it into their own magical fantasy-land, complete with modern chariots, damsels, white-knights and noble quests. Simone eventually abandons this charade, leaving George disillusioned.Perhaps because she is bisexual, and fond of Jordan's past explorations of sexuality, actress Jodie Foster approached Jordan with a script in the mid 2000s. This would evolve into "The Brave One", a 2007 work-for-hire which Jordan struggled to make his own.Set in New York City, "The Brave One" stars Foster as Erica. In love with her city, Erica spends her days fawning over New York's past, admiring its spaces, recording the city's sounds and praising it on her live radio show. This idyll is shattered when Erica's lover is violently murdered, a murder which is give racial/political connotations given the victim's ethnicity and given the films nods to the infamous 9/11 terror attacks. Jaded, disillusioned and seeking to resurrect her fantasy, Erica buys a gun and becomes a vigilante; she begins taking the law into her own hands.Vigilatees and angelic defenders are common in Jordan's filmography (see his debut, "Angel"). In "The Bave One", however, Erica is herself defended by the police detective (Terrence Howard) tasked with taking her down. The duo thus rekindle Jordan's obsession with impossible love, the criminal and the cop locked in unholy passion.Fittingly, "The Miracle", "The Brave One" and "Mona Lisa" all contain major characters who are writers and so tireless fantasists. In "Mona Lisa", George's best friend is a crime fiction writer. In "The Bave One", Erica herself strings words lovingly together, and in "The Miracle", two aspiring writers spend their days constructing wild tales. For Jordan, human beings are rarely more than heart-broken delusion machines.7.9/10 - Worth one viewing.

In this under-rated film Neil Jordan has created a very real portrait of how some teen-agers actually think and feel. The treatment of such a touchy subject as incest handled with a deft enough touch to almost make it believable.Some editing to cut redundant scenes would have made this a truly great movie. While watching Niall Byrne it was hard not to think of look alike Australian tennis player, Leyton Hewitt.

It is amazing such poetry some directors can create with so little money and The Miracle is just that. The kids may seem obnoxious to some people but they are just teenagers. Beverly D´Angelo is very well as the mysterious lady and the music fits perfectly into the whole movie. I´d love to watch it again if I could find it on tape.

Very much like Jordan's breakthrough, "The Crying Game," this earlier film wraps deftly realized details of contemporary Irish life around a fairy-tale plot, making an otherwise implausible denouement seem inevitable. Though the characters are almost archetypes, the solid performances and generally sharp dialogue freshen an age-old premise, and the banter between Jimmy and Rose is especially notable. The photography is at once unforgiving and lyrical, lending a haunted quality to the decaying seaside setting and evoking a carnivalesque atmosphere. The real star here, though, is Jordan's fundamentally cinematic sensibility; the effect the film creates would be diminished in any other medium. "The Miracle" amounts to more than the sum of its parts, and is one of this director's best efforts.