DVD Review: Rory O'Shea Was Here''

It was a mistake, I think, by the American distributors of the Irish film “Inside I’m Dancing” to rename the film “Rory O’Shea Was Here” for U.S. release. The latter title highlights the importance of one character when, in fact, the film’s effectiveness results from the development of a relationship between two people.

Good-hearted Michael (Steven Robertson) has a severe case of cerebral palsy and has known nothing but a safe, lonely life in a nursing home when he meets Rory (James McAvoy), a rebellious 20-year old with spiked hair and muscular dystrophy. Although Michael’s politeness leaves him open for ridicule by the outwardly rude Rory, the two wheelchair-confined young men become friends out of necessity. No one other than Rory can decipher Michael’s speech patterns, and no one other than Michael can stand Rory’s hostility for an extended period of time.

The best moments in “Rory O’Shea Was Here” depict the give-and-take camaraderie between the two characters. Michael and Rory seem to know that they are being used by each other, but they can live with that fact because they know they can skillfully manipulate people as a team in ways that they never could as individuals. They establish a nice rhythm together in a bar scene, for example, in which Rory’s direct charm gets them an initial audience of young women and Michael’s bashful naiveté, temporarily at least, dulls the girls’ urges to slap Rory, whose appeal fades a little more each time he opens his mouth.

Once the men manage to leave their nursing home for their own apartment, however, there doesn’t seem to be many other places for their story to go. And these characters, particularly Rory, aren’t intriguing enough to satisfactorily carry a tranquil plot. To his credit, McAvoy manages to turn Rory, the miserable punk with a chip on his shoulder, into a sympathetic person, but, for an audience, sympathizing with a character whose main emotion is anger and actually wanting to watch that person onscreen for two hours aren’t always synonymous. In “My Left Foot,” a movie about a difficult man in similar circumstances, Christy Brown was rarely a pleasant character. But he was an ultimately watchable one because, even in anger, he was much too complex to be described simply as a bitter man in a wheelchair. Yet, that seems to be precisely what the movie has in Rory O’Shea, a young man who possesses a lot of the same surface angst as many other young men. Though political correctness discourages me from observing so and though, by contrast, Michael isn’t such a quick study, the most interesting thing about Rory O’Shea is that he has muscular dystrophy.
          
Had the filmmakers created a deeper Rory, perhaps the movie would have held my interest more consistently. As it is, however, “Rory O’Shea Was Here” is a decent tale of two men that has a frustrating habit of emphasizing one character over the other.

Posted: June 14, 2005 ,   Modified: June 14, 2005