THE COMMITMENTS
With Robert Arkins, Michael Aherne, Angeline Ball, Maria Doyle, Johnny Murphy, Andrew Strong, and Colm Meaney.
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Even his severest critics probably wouldn’t challenge the notion that Parker has talent. He’s got a painter’s eye, and he knows how to use the considerable skills of his frequent collaborators–cinematographers Michael Seresin and Peter Biziou, production designer Brian Morris, and editor Gerry Hambling. You’d have trouble finding two other Hollywood movies as formally secure in their cutting, framing, and lighting as Mississippi Burning (1988) or Come See the Paradise (1990). Thematically, though, the two movies are maddening, impossible, because of the way Parker distorts their sociopolitical contexts. In Mississippi Burning, he ignores the well-documented destabilization and infiltration campaigns the federal government orchestrated against the civil rights movement and casts two white FBI agents as rogue heroes and eventual saviors. In Come See the Paradise, he blithely treats the sacrifices of an Irish political activist as equivalent in significance to the unconstitutional incarceration of his Japanese-American wife. At his absolute worst Parker uses the historical struggles of his minority subjects as a backdrop for stories that demonstrate the prowess of his white movie-star heroes. (In his defense, Parker has said that using white leads was the only way either of those movies would have been financed, and he’s probably right.)
Parker has been called a sentimentalist for being more interested in pleasing an audience than in verisimilitude. Critics have been wary of him because he got his start directing television commercials, and his films do reflect that background: his settings are stylized, pattern obsessive, postcard pretty in spite of their repressive subjects (Turkish prisons or Japanese internment camps). Yet despite the frequent perception of Parker as a filmmaker whose goal is box-office success, his popularity is more imagined than real. His best two films, Shoot the Moon (1982) and Birdy (1984), had limited regional releases; Pink Floyd–The Wall (1982) is a midnight-movie curiosity. Angel Heart (1987) and Come See the Paradise were unqualified bombs. In terms of box-office grosses, Bugsy Malone, Midnight Express (1979), and Fame (1980) were marginal successes. Despite Oscar nominations, controversy, and attendant publicity, Mississippi Burning earned a steady though unspectacular $35 million in grosses. This tension between commercial and noncommercial status has really trapped Parker, and he’s been largely unable to prove either his commercial credentials with the movie executives or his aesthetic impulses with his critics.
Jimmy shrewdly plays off the ennui of his edgy, profane friend Bernie (Bronagh Gallagher), who’s trapped in a nothing job, and convinces her to invite the shapely Imelda Quirke (Angeline Ball) into the group; Bernie also brings in the dark, ferocious Natalie (Maria Doyle). The three backup vocalists have an electric, intimidating sexual presence that gradually threatens to fracture the band’s already tenuous interrelations.
Parker is also smart enough to let the songs play uninterrupted, with few exceptions, and in the best moments–the band performing such covers as “Mustang Sally,” “In the Midnight Hour,” “The Dark End of the Street,” and “Try a Little Tenderness”–there’s a clear excitement. There are even unexpected pleasures, in particular the maturing of the women, initially frightened and unsure of themselves and by the end demanding our respect. When Doyle (who’s a backup singer with the estimable Irish folk group the Black Velvet Band) does a sultry, knockout version of “Chain of Fools,” the women are finally acknowledged as equals, and the band’s metamorphosis seems complete.
