The Butcher Boy
by Neil Jordan
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Alan Boyle (II), Andrew Fullerton, Eamonn Owens, Peter Gowen, Sean McGinleyDirector: Neil Jordan
Brand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.66:1
Running Time: 111 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-02-13
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of The Butcher Boy
Movie Review: Black Comedy Chronicles a Boy's Descent into Psychosis
Summary: 4 Stars
I had no idea what I was getting into when I watched this. Heartbreaking, darkly comic, but undeniably realistic, this film shows a fairly resourceful preteen boy's coping skills cruelly overcome by his family's misery and his best friend's abandonment. Francie's desperate fantasies that his friend Joe still cares about him, and his quickly-masked moments of devastation when those fantasies are crushed, are beautifully acted by young Eamonn Owens (and beautifully directed by Neil Jordan). Although the climax is shocking, the plot points leading up to it require no suspension of disbelief. The humor that pervades both the narration and the young Francie character makes you chuckle even as your heart aches. A unique and brilliantly-done film.
Summary of The Butcher Boy
Hailed coast-to-coast as one of 1998's best films! The director of The Crying Game and Interview with the Vampire crafts this inventive tale of a boy who uses humor, hooliganism and horror to cope with the world around him.Year: 1998 Director: Neil Jordan Starring: Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw, Eammon OwernsYou can't write off Francie Brady, apple-cheeked hero of The Butcher Boy, as a bad seed and have done with him. In Irish director Neil Jordan's often-surreal fairy tales, bad seeds grow the fruit of subversive knowledge: A master of blending the everyday with the truly mad and wonderfully weird, Jordan loves to encourage charismatic anarchists--driven by amoral energy and imagination--to attack the status quo with extreme prejudice. Exuberant Francie (Eamonn Owens, making a splendid debut) is a thorn in the side of rural Irish repression and hypocrisy. Better to call this smart, too-sensitive brat an ambulatory Rorschach, an uncensored billboard of his disapproving society's uglier truths and fears. A nonstop standup comedian ("And the Francie Brady Not a Bad Bastard Anymore Award goes to--Great God, I think it's Francie Brady!"), he projects fantasies of '60s cold war paranoia (atomic warfare leaves his village a graveyard of charred pigs), American "cowboys and Indians" pop culture, and Catholic Madonna worship (Sinead O'Connor appears as an earthy Virgin Mary). But Francie's rich fantasy life is no match for reality's "slings and arrows": His abusive da (Stephen Rea) pickles himself in drink, his fragile mother edges closer to suicide, "blood brother" Joe turns Judas, and a punitive stint at a Catholic reformatory ends with our Gaelic Holden Caulfield tricked out in girlish bonnet and ruffles, plaything of an addled old priest (Milo O'Shea). No wonder Francie's ultimately driven to exorcize his own Wicked Witch of the West. (He sees Mrs.?Nugent (Fiona Shaw), self-righteous pillar of a callous community, as the cause of his cursed life.) Laced with tragedy and hilarity, great beauty and horror, Jordan's adaptation of the Patrick McCabe bestseller mutates the adventures of Francie Brady--psychotic killer, performance artist, and purest innocent--into a sort of saint's life. --Kathleen Murphy
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