The Tiger's Tail
(106 mins, 18)
Directed by John Boorman, starring Brendan Gleeson, Kim Cattrall, Ciaran Hinds, Sinead Cusack
John Boorman is one of the greatest film-makers this country has produced. Several of his pictures are cinematic landmarks (Point Blank, Deliverance, Excalibur, Hope and Glory) and even when he's not at his best, which he isn't with The Tiger's Tail, they're ambitious and provocative. As he constantly pursues the same themes in different times and contexts (he's worked in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, North and South America) his films constitute a consistent oeuvre.
Writing about Excalibur in 1981, I noted certain recurrent themes and situations: 'Quests, encounters by rivers, dreams merging into reality, symbolic temptations, concepts of honour, man's divorce from nature, the conflict between free will and destiny.' All are to be found in The Tiger's Tail
Boorman is a mystical moralist and his 1965 debut, Catch Us If You Can, was, unlike most other Swinging Britain movies, a criticism of the hedonistic materialism of its time. It saw a malaise haunting the land in the same way as it tainted Arthur's Britain. Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur underlies almost everything he's done.
The Tiger's Tail, a noir comedy-thriller, is set in Ireland, where Boorman has lived and worked since the 1970s and become a major figure in Irish cinema; its major native talent, Neil Jordan, was an assistant on Excalibur, and Boorman produced his first film, Angel. The central character in The Tiger's Tail is Liam O'Leary (Brendan Gleeson), a prosperous property developer in his mid-forties, living in a Victorian mansion with an elegant wife (Kim Cattrall) and a teenage son (Gleeson's son, Briain).
He's a product of the Dublin slums like the real-life Martin Cahill, the antihero of Boorman's The General (also played by Gleeson), who became a notorious gangster and was bumped off, aged 43, in 1994 by the IRA for treading on too many toes.
In his way Liam is as ruthless as Cahill - but he's on the right side of the fence - a product of the tiger economy of the New Ireland and he's introduced to us on the night he's to receive an Irish Enterprise Award at a prestigious black-tie dinner. In a traffic jam returning home, surrounded by anxious, distracted people in expensive continental cars, he's approached by a beggar (to whom he gives a bottle of vintage wine) and a newspaper seller offering a tabloid with a front-page headline about Ireland's growing gap between rich and poor.
Then a squeegee man covers a furious Liam's windscreen with soapy water. As the man wipes it off, Liam seems to be looking at a scary version of himself. Is this a hallucination? Can this man be the doppelganger we're all supposed to have, a meeting with whom presages death? Can there be a twin brother he's unaware of?
Getting home, his rebellious Marxist son, contemptuous of his father's values, insults him, and his wife keeps a chilling distance as they prepare to go to the dinner. Before they leave, Liam thinks he's seen this doppelganger peering through the window and goes for his shotgun. Maybe this menacing figure is 'a projection of the part of yourself you hate', the son helpfully suggests. At the dinner, the master of ceremonies speaks of Liam's achievements in changing the skyscape of Dublin. 'James Joyce wouldn't recognise the place,' he says to general laughter as if this were a compliment and, as the film develops, there are significant echoes of Ulysses
Liam makes a speech that's both sentimental and aggressive, referring to the need to hold the Celtic economic tiger by the tail: 'Let it go and it will kill you.' But returning home in a chauffeur-driven car, he sees the doppelganger once again and pursues him into the dangerous night town, his son following. Liam finds himself in a swirling mass of binge drinkers and drug takers, fighting and vomiting. In a club lavatory, he's hit with a bottle, seemingly by the double, though his son Connor sees nobody.
It would be unfair to say more about the plot. But from then on, Liam sets off on a nightmare journey of discovery. His business begins to unravel, his marriage and family life are threatened. He loses his identity and begins to question who he is. Along the way, he sees and experiences another world, one his practices and lack of compassion have helped create: neglected patients in an asylum, a hostel for homeless derelicts, an overcrowded hospital's A&E wing that resembles something from the American Civil War. He is also reminded in a very personal way of the depredations and self-protective hypocrisy of the Catholic church.
The Tiger's Tail is a flawed movie that works better as a fable than as a direct reflection of reality; some of it is surprisingly heavy-handed, especially scenes involving the left-wing son. But Gleeson is excellent, there are several deeply moving scenes involving Sinead Cusack and generally it's a fascinating, thoughtful contribution to the dramatic literature of doubles, twins and doppelgangers that stretches from The Comedy of Errors to The Prisoner of Zenda.
