Hollywood may be crass when it comes to cloning success, but it's not alone. Take the British Isles, for instance, ever since the success of a certain working-class comedy about unemployed louts turned male strippers. It seems as if there has been a law put into effect that every comedy out of England or Ireland must now be some sort of attempt at the next Full Monty, from Among Giants to Waking Ned Devine. On the face of it, it shouldn't be that hard a formula to follow: small town, good-hearted losers with an elaborate scheme, classic oldies song on the soundtrack and so forth. Yet The Full Monty had a couple of things going for it that later films have found hard to duplicate, if indeed they tried at all: a subtext dealing with the alienation of the middle class (long before American Beauty discovered such a novel concept) and a breakout performance by the phenomenally talented Robert Carlyle.
Patrick Redmond
Mail order this: Cathleen Bradley douses Ian Hart, whose small-town Scottish character seeks American brides via personal ads.
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Rated PG-13.
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The latest entry in the "next Full Monty" sweepstakes is the Irish import The Closer You Get, from Monty producer Uberto Pasolini. The whimsy is in place, the oldies song ("The Sweetest Feeling") a classic gem, and there's even a solid lead actor in the form of Ian Hart (best known as John Lennon in Backbeat). But that's all there is. Gone is any trace of dramatic tension, or any sense of the drudgery of normal life. These characters enjoy the routine! At one point, Hart's character even expresses that sitting around drinking pints and watching football on satellite TV would be a good life, and he does so without a trace of irony (although he admits that having a girlfriend would be even better).
It all begins in the tiny Donegal village of Kilvaney, a town so whimsically small that you have to take a boat with you during a scenic walk, lest the tide come in and block your return route. This is strictly fantasy Ireland: No one drinks anything but Guinness; young bachelors have pullout magazine Bananarama posters on their walls; and the only movies anyone sees are biblical epics shown at the local church (which, apparently, no one attends otherwise -- quite a stretch for a country so strongly Catholic). When an embarrassing print mix-up occurs and the church ends up showing the Bo Derek film 10 instead of The Ten Commandments, the young men of the town are driven into a mating frenzy; the problem is that none of the local women are of any interest to them.
Enter the local butcher, Kieran (Hart), with the obligatory harebrained scheme. In cooperation with all the other local single men, he drafts a personal ad to be placed in The Miami Herald, seeking American women, age 20 to 21, for marriage. They all actually believe this plan is going to work.
That's essentially all the plot there is. Perhaps you can see where this premise is going to run into trouble: Unlike, say, an all-male burlesque show, not a lot of action is required to mail a letter and await a return, which leaves cast members dangling for almost the entire film; they pass the time mostly by drinking and dancing. Those wacky Irish.
Since the high-concept letter scheme is so obviously futile, there's not much dramatic tension. And since the boy-girl ratio in town is almost one to one, there's not much suspense as to how things will work out once the boys abandon their pipe dream. So what's left? The men act like fools, the women behave more rationally. No surprise there either. Laughs are wrung from an amusingly young and nervous priest. Gee, didn't Waking Ned Devine already go there? Hart is a good actor, frequently funny, but neither his character nor any of the others have anything at stake, save their ludicrous fantasy, so it's hard to invest any emotion in them. It's too bad The Closer You Get is being released after Valentine's Day. As a date movie, it gently prods both sexes without being excessively offensive, or all that interesting. No arguments with one's date are likely to ensue, in other words. However, no strong memories are likely to remain, either.
