In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993)

In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993)

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Pete Postlethwaite, Emma Thompson, John Lynch, Mark Sheppard, Don Baker, Corin Redgrave, Beatie Edney, Marie Jones, Daniel Massey, Paterson Joseph, Gerard McSorley. Screenplay: Terry George, Jim Sheridan, based on a book by Gerry Conlon. Cinematography: Peter Biziou. Production design: Caroline Amies. Film editing: Gerry Hambling. Music: Trevor Jones.

Reality doesn't come neatly packaged, so films based on "true stories" always have to lie to us. The trick is not letting the lies get in the way of what truth remains in the story. Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father was attacked for too much fictionalizing, too many departures from the facts, and the best that Sheridan could do was to claim that the film was not so much a story about Gerry Conlon and the Guildford Four -- falsely arrested for terrorism and imprisoned for 15 years until the verdict was overturned -- as it was about "a non-violent parent." And if Sheridan's film had been that, if it had focused more intensely on the relationship between Gerry and Giuseppe Conlon, it would have been a different film entirely. But Sheridan and co-screenwriter Terry George yielded to the temptation to stray into more dramatically conventional territory: the efforts to exonerate the Conlons and the others, and the courtroom showdown that resulted in their release. With the blurring of the facts, the film shifts into melodrama. But it's a very well-acted melodrama. Daniel Day-Lewis resorted to Method techniques -- spending time in jail and speaking with a Belfast accent even off-screen -- to get into Gerry Conlon's mind, and it's a wholly convincing performance, following Conlon from layabout to victim to victor. What there is of the troubled relationship of father and son is beautifully presented in the scenes with Pete Postlethwaite as Giuseppe, and Emma Thompson makes the most of the part of Gareth Peirce, who was not in fact so much the lone heroic defender as the script makes her out to be. In the Name of the Father holds the screen well -- if not as well as it might have if the fictionalizing choices hadn't been so obvious and conventional. 

Midnight Express (Alan Parker, 1978)

Randy Quaid, John Hurt, and Brad Davis in Midnight Express

Billy Hayes: Brad Davis
Susan: Irene Miracle
Tex: Bo Hopkins
Rifki: Paolo Bonicelli
Hamidou: Paul L. Smith
Jimmy Booth: Randy Quaid
Erich: Norbert Weisser
Max: John Hurt
Mr. Hayes: Mike Kellin
Yesil: Franco Diogene
Stanley Daniels: Michael Ensign
Chief Judge: Gigi Ballista
Prosecutor: Kevork Malikyan
Ahmet: Peter Jeffrey

Director: Alan Parker
Screenplay: Oliver Stone
Based on a book by William Hayes and William Hoffer
Cinematography: Michael Seresin
Production design: Geoffrey Kirkland
Film editing: Gerry Hambling
Music: Giorgio Moroder

Late in Midnight Express there's a line that suggests the reason Billy Hayes was confined so long in Turkish prisons is that he became a pawn in the negotiations between the Nixon administration and the government of Turkey over the cultivation of opium poppies. If true, that's a much more interesting story than the one the film tells, which is hardly a story at all, but just a grim sadomasochistic slog through the degrading experiences of Hayes, tinged with a bit of homoeroticism. Oliver Stone won an Oscar for his screenplay, which was only a foreshadowing of more of the same to come from Stone as he worked out his darker impulses on screen. The absence of anything more than a hint of what was going on to try to extract Hayes from his predicament, even to explain how he got into it (who, for example, is the shadowy American called Tex, who is "something like" a consular official?) turns the film into one long wallow in misery and a rather devastating one-sided portrait of the country of Turkey.