The Don of Dublin

When John Boorman stood up at the Cannes Film Festival in May to accept his best director prize for “The General,” a fact-based gangster film, not everybody was applauding. Some citizens of the British filmmaker’s adopted homeland of Ireland were downright irate. Like “The Godfather” and almost every other powerful crime film you can think of, this one has been slammed for romanticizing a violent thug.

The movie’s title character, Martin Cahill (played by Brendan Gleeson), was Dublin’s most notorious criminal mastermind of the 1980s. A brilliant tactician and a meticulous planner (hence his military nickname) who pulled off some of the richest and most elaborate jewel robberies and art thefts the city had even seen. But Cahill (the Irish say “Cah-hill,” not “Cay-hill”) was also a brutal gang boss from one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, infamous for inflicting brutal punishments upon anyone who crossed him.

He was also a bit of a folk hero, an anarchic free spirit who enjoyed tweaking authority figures of all sorts, from the Garda (the Irish national police force) to the self-righteous vigilantes of the Irish Republican Army. It was an IRA hit man who put an end to Cahill’s tumultuous career in August 1994. The General, sitting behind the wheel of his Renault, pulled up at a stop sign near his home and was shot four times.

Cahill’s exploits were exhaustively chronicled in Dublin tabloids like the Sunday World, whose chief crime reporter, Paul Williams, working undercover, broke the story of the Cahill mob in 1987. He also wrote the 1995 bestseller called “The General: Godfather of Crime” that served as the basis of Boorman’s script.

“Cahill became an emblem for Irish society,” Wlliams says, speaking by phone from his home in Dublin. “He was the man you loved to hate, something you could point to and say, ‘There is the evil.’

“He was our equivalent of Al Capone, an Irish criminal for the Irish people.”

In terms of the specific acts it depicts, the movie--which opens in Los Angeles on Wednesday--doesn’t gloss over Cahill’s criminal depredations. The effort at balance is built into the casting. Jon Voight, teamed with Boorman for the first time since 1972’s “Deliverance” and sporting a note-perfect Irish accent, is a strong presence as Ned Kenny, a composite character based on several cops who pursued the gangster.

The detective’s blunt observations undercut the gangster’s salt-of-the-earth pretensions. Kenny points out, for example, that an ingenious jewel robbery, reenacted as a crowd-pleasing set-piece, eventually threw 100 ordinary Dubliners out of work.

Boorman admits, however, that every movie tends to glamorize its subject, no matter how monstrous. “My mentor at the BBC in the 1960s, a man named Hugh Kenner, had a favorite saying: ‘The act of making a film is always a celebration,’ ” Boorman says, “however critical you may try to be. . . . It’s kind of like Bertolt Brecht and his play ‘Mother Courage.’ The nastier he made that character, the more people enjoyed it.”

In his introduction to the paperback edition of “The General’s” screenplay, Boorman carries the “celebration” theme a step further: “We finished the schedule with a week of nights. Our last night was in the Wicklow mountains above Luggala. . . . We spoke with the muted voices of interlopers in a cathedral. On such nights the spirits make their presence felt. We should not have been surprised had some Celtic chieftain with the face of Martin Cahill appeared in our midst.”

The legendary references didn’t sit well with some of Cahill’s victims. “The mythic Celtic stuff is nonsense,” former Dublin forensic scientist James Donovan complained in a press interview. “The filmmakers are in some Celtic twilight mist of their own.”

Donovan’s run-in with the General is frankly depicted in the film. In 1982, just a day before he was scheduled to testify against Cahill in a robbery case, Donovan was severely injured by a car bomb. He lost the use of one leg, and his vision was permanently impaired by slivers of flying metal.

“People say there are humorous bits in the film,” Donovan said, “but my experience of [Cahill’s] humor was his laughter as he came down the steps of the court. And the next day the bomb went off in my car.”

Boorman says that he can certainly understand why Donovan “didn’t appreciate Cahill’s sense of humor.” And Donovan was not alone. Before it was even made, Boorman says, “the film was incredibly controversial. People were poaching copies of the script and analyzing it. But the controversy mostly went away after the picture opened, because it is fair to all parties. I do show James Donovan being blown up, and I show him heroically limping back into court on crutches to give his evidence.”

*

To a degree, the feeling of “romance” in “The General” is a matter of style more than content. Boorman, 65, the writer-director of “Hope and Glory” (1987), has always enjoyed tackling difficult material--often physically difficult, involving arduous months of shooting in the rain forests of Asia (1995’s “Beyond Rangoon”) or South America (1985’s “The Emerald Forest”).

The new film, however, photographed in silky wide-screen black-and-white, often with languorous gliding camera moves, is a notably unstrenuous crime movie.

“So many of my films have been made at the absolute extremities of my powers,” Boorman said during an interview in Los Angeles. “I used to feel that if I wasn’t pushing myself to the very limits, I wasn’t doing justice to the material. But ‘The General’ was made well within my limits. . . . The experience made me think of something David Lean said a few weeks before he died: ‘I’m just beginning to get the hang of this.’ ”

The seductiveness of the filmmaking in “The General” can be a little unsettling, however, considering its often horrific subject matter. Cahill was a disciplined professional criminal, but brutality was one the staple tools of his trade. “From what I could gather,” says actor Gleeson, “he wasn’t somebody who enjoyed indulging in violence. He was very good at it, though, very good at making people afraid.”

There may be another explanation for the romantic aura that the movie conjures around Cahill, despite the filmmakers’ efforts to acknowledge his brutality. Gleeson’s performance makes such a strong case for Cahill as a human being, even in the face of appalling “physical evidence.” The combination of bone-deep authenticity and movie star charisma carries us well beyond mere identification with the character.

“It took me a long time to get rid of him, I’ll tell you that,” says Gleeson, a sizable but relaxed and articulate man, now in his early 40s. “It took me so long to get at him, too. I had been doing all the reading, listening to all the stories, looking at all this footage, getting all the externals.

“I got as close as I could externally to Martin Cahill, but he was still somebody else, it was mimicry, and John said, ‘It’s not really coming from inside.’ I had to find out what was going on inside.”

Boorman adds: “A lot of people have said to me, ‘[The performance] doesn’t look like acting.’ Brendan just seems to be that person. A lot of people seem to find that disturbing. . . .”

Reporter Williams, who met Cahill on several occasions, confirms that Gleeson’s resemblance to the criminal is “uncanny.” Visiting the set one day, the journalist’s 9-year-old son spotted the actor in costume and exclaimed, “Da, look, the General is alive!”

There is no discernible trace of aloofness or self-consciousness in Gleeson’s performance. He seems to be fully present on the screen as a man. This, even more than the rough physical similarity, may be what the folks back home were thinking when they dubbed Gleeson “the Irish Depardieu.”

“I always felt he was more like James Cagney,” director Boorman says. “The vitality, the drive. Certainly I thought of ‘White Heat’ when I was making ‘The General.’ ”

Best known as Mel Gibson’s fiercely bearded compatriot Hamish in “Braveheart,” Gleeson is rising quickly. Between the time “The General” was shot and its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival in September, a prodigious buzz was already building. A pair of Irish indie productions--”I Went Down” (in which he played a jaunty small-time gangster) and “Sweety Barrett” (featured at Los Angeles’ recent AFI Film Festival)--had helped spread the word. Gleeson has just finished playing a Yank, in the monster-alligator thriller “Lake Placid,” which is scheduled for release in spring.

Gleeson came by his man-of-the-people demeanor the old-fashioned way: by working for it. Although he has been acting off and on since his school days, he also toiled full time as a high school teacher until 1989, and took up acting professionally only in his 30s.

“I got started kind of late,” he says, “although I certainly don’t regret that I had a normal life before I got into this business. The experience of working 9 to 5, in the expectation that this is going to be your life, that helps me to explore people whose lives are similar. If there’s one thing that’s been consistent with me, it’s a sense of curiosity. I’ve always been curious about how other people carry on.

“As an artist, that’s really the main thing that I have to give, that I can put people in the position to understand the other person’s point of view. That doesn’t mean to condone it, it just means to not see them as alien creatures.”

*

It was this attitude, as much as anything, that made Gleeson a good fit for the movie Boorman intended to mak, depicting Cahill neither as a monster nor a folk hero but simply as a human being whose life took a lamentable turn.

It was never enough for Cahill just to outfox the police at every turn; he had to rub their noses in it. Among Cahill’s sartorial trademarks were undergarments decorated with the cartoon image of Mickey Mouse, a snide reference to his opinion of officialdom. (In the movie, pictures of a dancing pig are substituted on Cahill’s cop-taunting T-shirts and boxer shorts; Boorman says Disney didn’t want Mickey’s image used in that way.)

Cahill’s antic behavior didn’t win over all the factions of Irish society. Famously, and fatally, he rubbed the Irish Republican Army the wrong way. A review of Williams’ book published in 1995 in an IRA newspaper takes issue with the writer’s portrayal: “Cahill was a different type from the lovable rogue painted by Williams. Cahill was an evil, vindictive man, and some of the episodes recounted . . . do no justice to the savagery involved in those events. . . .”

Boorman puts a copy of the review aside and shakes his head. “I was quite happy to have an opportunity to take a dig at the IRA because they have been involved in Mafia-like activities,” he says. “Even during the present cease-fire, they’re continuing with their beatings of people who are supposed to be doing drugs. They see it as their role to protect the Nationalist society against wrongdoers.

“The big gripe they had against ‘The General’ was when the UVF [the Ulster Volunteer Force, the major Protestant paramilitary group] blew up a pub that was an IRA meeting place, and they believed that because Cahill had sold some stolen paintings to the UVF, he must have helped them with this bombing. And he may well have, I have no idea. But that was why they took him out.”

Boorman is quick to add that in his view Cahill was neither pro- nor anti-IRA in any political sense: “His attitude was that the IRA was simply another institution, with rules, and he was so anarchic that he just lumped them in with all the others. The closest I got to him, really, was through his sister (Oona), and his sister said that Martin believed that the whole of society was corrupt and that capitalism was all about theft--whether this was just to justify his actions or not, who’s to say?”

The film also implies that the Irish police may have winked at Cahill’s murder, intentionally stepping aside at a crucial moment and allowing the execution to proceed. Cahill had been under continuous police surveillance for months, but in the movie the round-the-clock watch appears to have been lifted just before the shooting--which occurred one day before the cease-fire of 1994 was to go into effect.

“The shooting of Martin Cahill was the last action the IRA took before the cease-fire,” Boorman says. But Williams dismisses any implication of a conspiracy. “We’re involved in a delicate stage of the peace process,” he says. “You have to realize how very, very sensitive it would be to suggest that the Garda and the IRA colluded. There is no evidence of that. Quite the opposite. Those fellows hate each other.”

*

Martin Cahill was, according to “The General,” a man for whom crime was more than a way to make a quick buck. It was his passion, his life’s work; a true vocation.

From the start, “The General” evokes the exhilaration of crime, in scenes of the young Martin (played by Eamon Owens, who had the title role in Neil Jordan’s “The Butcher Boy”) whooping through the streets of the Hollyfield Buildings housing project on larcenous errands that are indistinguishable from boyish high jinks. We also see how the behavior is reinforced in this setting: Any tweaking of authority is applauded. When Martin brings home stolen food items, his family is apparently delighted by the windfall.

As an adult, Cahill rises from the dinner table and glides off into the night for a spot of cat-burgling, moving in rapt silence through a luxurious house, peeking in on the snoozing residents, and pawing through their private trinkets, as a plaintive Van Morrison tune, “This Must Be Paradise,” rises on the soundtrack. As Cahill moves wraith-like through the shadows of other people’s lives, the mood is sensuous, almost erotic.

“He really did have this extraordinary ability, a gift for stillness,” Boorman says. “If he was surprised during a robbery, he would go into a closet and just stand there absolutely motionless for hours.”

For Gleeson, Cahill’s life has an element of tragedy; that a person of such vitality, intelligence and self-discipline came to squander those gifts, to cause enormous suffering and to die bleeding in the street.

“The final thought you have to have,” Gleeson says, “is just, what a waste. What a bloody awful bleeping waste.”