Pluto Proves Too Distant

Breakfast on Pluto

Directed by Neil Jordan

Sooner or later, every great director makes a film about a holy innocent. Breakfast on Pluto is Neil Jordan's version, a picaresque about the misadventures of a lovable transvestite named Patrick "Kitty" Braden (Cillian Murphy), by turns a foundling infant, a Catholic-school misfit, a rock star's squeeze, a prostitute, a peep-show performer and an IRA bombing suspect. Jordan and cowriter Patrick McCabe (who wrote the same-titled 1992 novel) cite the influence of Candide, about a blundering, naïve everyman who insists, against all evidence, that this truly is the best of all possible worlds. But other picaresques come to mind, notably Pinocchio, two American "cowboy" movies (Midnight and Drugstore), the previous Jordan-McCabe collaboration, Butcher Boy, and Forrest Gump (which Pluto evokes via cutesy airborne shots of wisecracking CGI robins that flit through the movie like Gump's magic feather).

Jordan, whose work tends toward doomed romanticism, is in a more glancing, prankish frame of mind here, kind of a Goodfellas mode, constructing Patrick's life story as a mosaic of first-person-narrated vignette pasted together with restless camerawork, snappy edits and a soundtrack of jukebox oldies. Once baby Patrick's mum has abandoned him on a stranger's doorstep, we jump ahead to a barely pubescent Patrick playing IRA soldier games with other neighborhood misfits (including a "Dr. Who"?obsessed kid with Down's Syndrome, played by Seamus Reilly), and later to him trying on dresses when his adoptive mom's not home. Then we skip ahead to Patrick's crazy teenage years, which include a complicated (and, astonishingly, nonsexual) relationship with the local priest (Liam Neeson, collared again) and an account of Patrick's hellraising in school (he writes a randy fantasy about the priest and a housekeeper he thinks might have been his birth mother).

Jordan and McCabe's script is literally conceived in chapters, with numbers and titles. There's the chapter where Patrickgoes on the road with a cowboy-styled, IRA?connected musician named Billy Rock (Gavin Friday) and becomes Rock's offstage lover and onstage squaw (wide-eyed and buckskin-fringed, Patrick looks like Natalie Wood at the end of The Searchers). There's a chapter where Patrick pals around with an affable but hot-tempered alcoholic named John-Joe (Brendan Gleeson), who makes his living as a costumed children's entertainer. (In movies, when a character puts on an animal suit, it's only a matter of time before he beats somebody up.) There's a chapter where Patrick becomes an apprentice to a lackluster magician (Jordan regular Stephen Rea) and multiple chapters in which Patrick runs afoul of the IRA, the British authorities or both.

It's all so wide-ranging and eccentric that I really wish it worked. Pluto is the kind of movie that a great director's fans will be tempted to overrate. It touches on so many established Jordan elements (ideologically driven violence, personal and physical transformation, the hidden sensitivity of brutish men, the coexistence of polite and impolite society and social outcasts' instinctive tendency toward fellowship) that it sometimes feels richer, more precise and more complete than it really is. The movie's superficial similarities to The Butcher Boy mark the two movies as companion pieces, but Butcher was much more cohesive, and its hero much more threatening and alive.

To be fair, while the more extravagant touches feel forced (the bitchy robins play like what they are: software-generated and whimsical), Pluto is always watchable and sometimes splendid. Jordan is a visionary; not a mere director, but a filmmaker. His grasp of imagery-as-metaphor is so assured that one wishes it had been more freely indulged so that Jordan had grabbed this jumbled, meandering tale by the scruff of its neck, ripped it apart and reassembled it at the level of a fairy tale or a dream, which is where Patrick's narration begins, after all.

Jordan is a master of dream logic-The Company of Wolves, Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, The Butcher Boy and the hyperactive but fascinating In Dreams are all free-associative, more about feelings, anxieties and social attitudes than plot points, so it's no surprise that Pluto becomes less compelling the more "gritty" and "real" it becomes. Likewise, there are marvelous structural patterns (watch how Jordan subliminally connects the rectangular screen/mirror/window shapes found in confession booths and peep shows) that are simple but powerful images that compress an entire era into one shot. (The troubles during the 1970s are distilled into a shot of a glitter ball falling, shattering and being swallowed in flames during a nightclub bombing.)

Yet the whole thing doesn't cohere because Jordan never settles on an attitude toward Patrick. He starts and ends the movie as a mesmerizing collection of mannerisms that never solidify into a complete, credible person, in the way that, say, Candide or Joe Buck or Forrest Gump did. If Jordan was making the point that Kitty is too artificial, too consciously self-constructed, too much a theatrical/psychological construct to ever feel complete and happy and satisfied-if he were, in a sense, a gender-bending human Pinocchio prevented by his upbringing and society's prejudices from ever becoming "real," that would be a valid and satisfying point of view.

But I don't think Jordan intended this, and as the movie unreels and unreels (at 135 music-and-glitter-packed minutes, it's exhausting, a marathon paced like a sprint), it becomes increasingly tough to discern what, exactly, was intended. It makes no sense to argue, as some Pluto fans have, that the movie's IRA subplots link up with Patrick's quest for self-determination and a fixed identity because Patrick is self-determined from the moment we meet him, and his identity isn't divided. Patrick thinks of himself primarily as a fantastic femme named Kitty, and devotes so much of his energy to realizing that self-image that all other considerations, including religion, politics and class, become irrelevant. He's sweet and passive (more so as the movie goes on and as the world grinds Kitty down), but he's never conflicted about his identity.

Even Patrick's desire to meet his long-gone birth mother is more about narrative closure than personal illumination, since it's obvious that meeting mum wouldn't change (or even strengthen) Patrick'sidentity. With his sharp cheekbones, E.T. eyes, croaky low voice, slimhips and coat-hanger shoulders, Murphy is a spectacular camera subject;he could be Dr. Frank N. Furter's baby brother. In his ownfeather-light, innocent, slightly dim way, this sexy, glam naïf seemsto know who he is, or who, in a better world, he would like to be.That's more than you can say for the movie.