Hard Time

Rassle dazzle: Shawn Hatosy and Danny Dyer tussle.

Borstal Boy puts Brendan Behan’s celebrated memoir on lockdown.

Borstal Boy

by Sam Adams

Borstal BoyDirected by Peter Sheridan A Strand Films release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

Sometimes a harmless moment gives the game away. When Liz (Eva Birthistle) turns to her father (Tom Courtenay), the warden of the reform school in which most of Borstal Boy is set, and complains, “I’m an artist -- how am I supposed to paint here?” it’s a throwaway, a hint that she’s a flower in the dirt. But the sheer clumsiness of the line, freighted as it is with tone-deaf exposition -- if she didn’t say she was “an artist,” we’d think she was a housepainter -- says a lot about the tin ear with which Peter Sheridan has adapted Brendan Behan’s celebrated memoir. Behan, an Irishman of letters whose works include the play The Quare Fellow, was celebrated as much for his writing as for his legendary drunkenness and steadfast support of the IRA. (The former killed him; the latter landed him in jail more than once.) But rather than a memoir of transgression, a barstool-spun version of The Thief’s Journal, Sheridan neuters Behan’s prose, rendering no more than a harmless trifle.

Behan, who entered the borstal of the title at the age of 16, convicted of smuggling dynamite for the IRA, talked candidly of his homosexual experiences, but the film reduces that candor to a moderately passionate kiss (performed in drag) between Brendan (American Shawn Hatosy, affecting a passable Dublin accent) and the openly gay Charlie (Danny Dyer), swiftly contained by Brendan's romance with the warden's daughter (a character invented for the film). Behan's passionate Republicanism is reduced to a handful of empty slogans (and this from the family that gave us In the Name of the Father andSome Mother's Son). Courtenay is saddled with playing a soft-shouldered caricature, the kind who tells his boys, "Don't sneak off without telling me," and the film's settings are rendered a listless gray, one that conveys less imprisonment than lassitude. One thing Borstal Boy gets right, though: just like prison, you want to get out of it as soon as you can.

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