Is the Actor Happy?

Winter has been brutal in more than the obvious ways. I just heard via a friend’s Facebook update that Vic Chestnutt gave up the ghost on Christmas Day. Justin Keating, a lion of the Irish left has also died (Garrett Fitzgerald remembers their work together in cabinet here) Cardinal Cathal Daly has gone to God, just as the Catholic hierarchy finally, mulishly owns up to its failure to protect children from sexual abuse. By Irish standards, his funeral seemed small and subdued, testament to the painful truth that however much we get right in this life, getting one awful thing very, very wrong is hard for others to forgive.

A funeral full of colourful characters, sadness and celebration was that of Michael Dwyer, Ireland’s best film critic. He was described by Daniel Day Lewis as “gentle, modest and kind”, a critic who “was never cruel, ever, nor was he self-serving.” That is high praise from an actor. (More here) Dwyer wasn’t afraid to tell you when a film was rubbish. He just had no need for spite or ego in how he did it.

Hugh Linehan relates many of Michael Dwyer’s achievements, and reminds me of lots I hadn’t known of or had forgotten: Dwyer was a Kerryman, and gave the Tralee Film Society and later the Federation of Irish Film Societies a kick in the arse at a time when there was so little choice in Ireland for films, books and music. He founded and later saved the Dublin Film Festival. Dwyer had friends throughout the world of cinema; the French government recognized him and declared him a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

I grew up in a little town in 1980s Ireland. I wouldn’t wish to have lived anywhere else, but even to a rather prim teenager it felt limited. Most of the notoriously banned books like Ulysses or Lady Chatterley’s Lover were freely available by then, but our cultural window was still narrow. Books were Mills and Boone in the supermarket or something you went to Dublin for. Films were whatever was showing at the local flea-pit, assuming it was open and not, at that moment, turned into a restaurant or just left to rot. Television had two channels and video, when Xtravision came to our town, was mostly Rocky’s and Jean Claude van Damme flicks.

It’s hard to imagine, in the age of information, how few and how prized the channels of knowledge and cultural nous were just fifteen or twenty years ago in rural Ireland. Michael Dwyer’s weekly film reviews in the Irish Times showed that movies were more than an excuse to sit with a boy in the jumbo seats. His articles implied that any of us could belong to a sophisticated world far beyond the artistic confines of the RTE Guide. Every year he went to Cannes and watched film after film, his dispatches keeping us as much in the know as any reader of the Guardian or Le Monde.

Or, as Fr. Kennedy, who knew Dwyer and said his funeral Mass said;

“His life directed our attention beyond the village, beyond sameness, outwards. His interest and his energy positively drew us into another world, where representation of life was different, where the other view was possible.”

When I worked in the film industry in the 1990s, I knew of Dwyer as a cheerleader for Irish films, and one of life’s natural and knowledgeable enthusiasts. He was often to be seen milling around at the Irish Film Centre, or running the show at the Dublin Film Festival. Dwyer championed Irish films (at least the good ones) abroad, and opened the eyes of generations of Irish film-makers to world cinema. He was far from an art house snob, however. He just loved the movies, through and through. I’ve always felt he was a man after my own heart; he never gave Keanu Reeves a truly crushing review.