Irish director Neil Jordan's least-known film is perhaps his most aptly named. The overblown ghost story High Spirits may not levitate your mood, and the stunning secret of The Crying Game may not make you weep, but The Miracle
will stick with you for weeks after you've seen it, making you think you
can smell the sea or hear the first few notes of a jazz solo in the most
unlikely places. This tiny gem of a movie has more in common with Mona Lisa than Interview With the Vampire
or any of Jordan's bigger-budget pictures. It includes performances from little-known
actors and cinematography of such unexpected beauty that you find your eyes
misting as you watch.
Jimmy and Rose, teenagers living in the small Irish coastal town of Bray, spend
boring summer afternoons making up wild romantic stories about the people they
see on the beach. One day they spot Renee, a beautiful American actress who
has come to their little resort after taking a role at a mediocre Dublin theater.
Rose thinks Renee is more interesting as a mystery to ponder, a potential film
noir heroine with dark secrets in her past. But Jimmy becomes infatuated and
wants to know all about Renee, to find the real story. This arouses Rose's jealousy
to such an extent that she pursues an affair with a hot-headed lion tamer from
an itinerant circus, hoping to tame him in turn.
Jimmy's ostensibly widowed father is a frustrated musician, who has taught
his son to play the saxophone and tried, with bumbling affection, to instill
the proper values concerning music and love. Yet the older man becomes enraged
when he discovers his son's obsession and orders Jimmy to stay away from Renee.
"The trouble with women of a certain age is that they're of a certain age,"
Rose observes wryly. Of course this only arouses the boy further, and he's further
confused by Renee's strange, frustrated attempts to cling to his affections
while maintaining her distance. Despite his prurient interest in the folk of
the town, Jimmy is just beginning to explore his own desires; he aches for the
older woman not as a sexual object or a worldly tutor, but as the key to something
missing in his life that he can't even define.
Jimmy's world is suffused with the amorphous, encompassing presence of the sea
and with jazz, which his father plays and demands that he practice and which
Renee sings. Jimmy's most intimate moments with her take place when he accompanies
her on standards and when they talk by the water, which symbolizes simultaneously
the danger of drowning and the possibility of escaping utterly the confines
of his small-town existence. Rose sees those possibilities more clearly, seeing
herself and Jimmy reflected in the caged circus animals, plotting a grand sacrificial
gesture that will release them both from their confinements.
Like The Crying Game, The Miracle hinges on a hidden twist when
one character makes an unexpected discovery about the identity of another. In
this film, though, any attentive viewer will perceive it long before the revelation
begins the upheavals of the climax. It's a very old story -- one of the oldest,
as Rose wryly remarks -- yet the replaying of the myth in this fairy tale setting
changes the focus of the inevitable discovery. The real mystery of The Miracle
concerns not the secret but the unknowns of growing up, choosing dreams to pursue,
deciding whether to concentrate on traditional melodies or let wild improvisation
bring dissonance -- and, possibly, astonishing beauty -- into the world.
The film has a deliberately manufactured feel, conscious of the literariness
of its own dialogue and the rose-colored lenses with which it views the small
Irish town. As Rose and Jimmy walk across the "nun-swept pier" of Bray, creating
fantasy histories for the people they see, they congratulate themselves for
coming up with particularly luscious turns of phrase. The cinematography doesn't
shirk from showing the run-down buildings and the ravages of poverty, but the
effect is more that of peering into a haunted house than seeing a realistic
landscape. The traveling circus lends a purposefully carnivalesque air to the
proceedings. The threat of a satiric twist, an over-the-top performance like
those on the Dublin stage, hovers menacingly; it's not clear until the end whether
The Miracle will be romantic, tragic, or a burlesque.
Vivid performances by young actors Niall Byrne and Lorraine Pilkington and veteran
Donal McCann keep the surreal drama in focus. Beverly D'Angelo's Renee remains
maddeningly elusive; the movie never really explores her as a character, but
only as an archetype, yet the actress gives her a powerful, tragic aura. If
Renee is not a sensitively fleshed-out character like Jimmy and his father,
her own frustrated dreams subsumed in the demands of the plot, at least she's
not reduced to the mystery woman who first appears beside the train.
The foggy seaside of Bray is a character in its own right... salty and mystical,
where decades of ennui have not diminished the possibility that something extraordinary
could happen at any time. Jordan's homecoming moves from brutal to transcendent
in a breathtaking sequence of images and dialogue that won't soon be forgotten.
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