Peter Mackie Burns | Rialto / 2019

dirge for an ordinary man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark O’Halloran (screenplay), Peter Mackie Burns (director) Rialto / 2019

 

Metaphorically speaking, Peter Mackie Burns tale of Dublin docks worker Colm (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) is one long dirge sung in the darkest of bass voices. The excellent musical score by Valentin Hadjadj punctuates this with dissonant tone clusters that alternate at moments with something similar to lyrical moans.

     Indeed, the film has often criticized for its preponderance of dark scenes, but how else to express a world of a man who spent his entire life in the docks about to become enter what the business world describes as “redundancy” in his mid-40s, despite his best intentions and basically good work on the job?

    On top of this, his abusive father has father has just died, and given Colm’s inability to communicate to his own son, Shane (Scott Graham) he is terrified that we too will be perceived upon his death as force more hated than loved. Raised in traditional Catholicism, Colm, despite is father’s abuse—which even his mother confirms—also feels an intense guilt for not having loved his father or being unable to serve him as a loyal and committed offspring.

      All Colm really has going for him is a good relationship with his daughter Kerry (Sophie Jo Wasson) whose warmth a friendliness only reiterates the iciness of Shane’s reactions to even the most tentative of attempts his father makes to communicate with his disapproving son.

      His wife, Claire (a role beautifully acted by Monica Dolan) deeply loves and cares for him, but even her worries for his sudden return to alcohol and her internal suffering for his inability to return that love adds to his sense of guilt. Indeed, as numerous critics have observed, although Colm seldom speaks, many of his statements are simply apologias, as if he were responsible somehow for most of the problems in his world. Writing in Variety, Jessica Kang makes specific note of this seeming “tic.”

 

 “The diffident Dubliner Colm…apologizes a lot. When he bumps into someone. When someone bumps into him. When he answers the phone or forgets a household task or mishears his wife. All those little excuses are partly the accurate observation of an authentically Irish verbal tic, as detailed in Mark O’Halloran’s cleverly colloquial screenplay, based on his own stage play. But there is also the sense that Colm’s frequent exhalations of apology are flak cannon fire, sent up into the ether to disguise and distract from an enormous, deeply repressed guilt that there’s no “sorry” large enough to cover. Rialto pivots claustrophobically around a crisis moment that drives Colm to act on the very desires he has perhaps been apologizing for all along.”

    In the midst of the dilemmas of his losses of father, son, and job—or perhaps, in part, because of them—Colm’s mid-life crisis is even more highly impacted by his sudden realization that he is attracted to, one might almost say obsessed with, a local 19-year-old boy, almost the age of his own son. He’s obviously been watching him for a long while and has communicated with him on a message service for gay sex. The meet-up at a shopping center near the docks, early on in the film, comes almost as a shock for Colm, as the handsome kid, with bleached spike hair immediately shows up and lures him into a bathroom stall where the elder immediately gets cold feet while at the same time being irresistibly attracted to the boy. He attempts to pull out of the situation, particularly when the boy demands payment, but at the same time cannot resist telling him how long he’s been observing him, and surprised at how young he is. It ends in a threat and Colm slugging, with deep regret, his way out of the situation, while losing his wallet to the boy in the maneuvers.

     The boy, who soon turns up to his workplace office, demands money €200 or he’ll tell his wife and boss. “Do you want me to shame you? I can shame you”—as if there were any way to further shamed this already guilt-ridden being.

      Yet, almost as suddenly Colm discovers the boy is not a true blackmailer but is a mixed-up kid who has been involved in sex trade since he was 14, and is now simply attempting to raise enough money to support a child he has fathered with a girlfriend who has since severed most ties with him. The two live in neighboring motel rooms, with the boy, Jay (Tom Glynn-Carney), caring for his beloved daughter Chloe when the mother goes shopping or has reasons to leave the child in his care. He appears to be their only support, but does fairly well as a male prostitute without her knowledge of where the money comes.

      The situation, both Jay’s aggression and his underlying fragility further play into Colm’s own condition, particularly when out of his own sense of guilt and failure who goes missing from his family on all night drunks. And it isn’t long before he’s seeing Jay regularly.

     They first meet up in his car in a late-night empty parking garage where Colm simply watches the boy masturbate. The act might be represented as one of thousands of such elderly men’s abuse of young boys across the world as they seek out a voyeuristic relationship that generally goes no further than watching or mutual fellatio. In such situations neither the male or the prostitute see themselves as actually being “gay” or homosexual, but simply as needing some release or, in the kid’s case, money. And in this case both Kolm and Jay are typical in claiming that neither of them is homosexual.

       But we soon discover that Colm not only enjoys the company of the young male but is actually deeper into the homosexual ethos than we might have expected when, upon their second meeting at a cheap bed-and-board, he asks the boy to fuck him. It is one thing for such an individual to imagine he is a bisexual attracted to youth for their beauty, which is the direction this film first hinted for the middle-aged man. But enjoying anal sex from a young boy takes everything much further—so much further, in fact, that there can be no return for Colm, as he still attempts to balance his mother’s needs, his wife’s and family’s survival, and his own radically different desires.

      Like so many men, Colm obviously went through much of his life on automatic. Himself a product of abuse he has apparently slept-walked through his early years, following the traditional established restrictions of work, marriage, and family life. They are roles played out by millions by rote, carefully laid down by their parents from the earliest days of childhood. Other emotional pushes and pulls, seldom permitted to bubble up from within the cauldron of daily life, are easily ignored, scorned, dismissed. Only with a series of crises do they push forward, demanding to spill out into the world as truth.

      Colm obviously wishes for a return to “normalcy.” He arranges for his father’s “month’s mind” (the ritual of the Catholic church that brings together survivors a month after the death of a loved one)—even inviting his father’s secret mistress to the event—while attempting to mend some of his relations with family members by trying to talk with his son (he’s immediately rejected) and inviting his wife out for dinner so that they might “talk” (she’s absolutely delighted).

    For a few moments, we even wonder whether he might find a way out of his inevitable self-destruction and collapse of his family, but grief, guilt, and alcohol fuse a fire in his soul once again that results in him attempting to visit Jay at his motel room where he discovers him lovingly caring for his daughter, reminding Colm not only of how inappropriate his visit is, but how ill-conceived are his obsessions. Instead of meeting up with his wife for dinner, he wanders the strand, calling up for the film’s viewers and, we soon discover, for his wife Claire as well the possibility that he’s considering suicide.

       His return home is met by a frantic wife who no longer able to deal with the worry is on her way to live with her mother until Colm can work things out. When his son Shane once again dismisses him, he angrily declares how little his son knows him or perhaps even knows how or why he should hate him, sharing with his son the fact that he is seeing a boy of nearly the same age and enjoying being fucked by him. As one can imagine, only further violence follows.

      Escaping once more to the bed and board with the boy he now perceives as a lover, he attempts to explain to Jay what he means to him, offering to help pay for his expenses and suggesting that he offers him the needed friendship in his time of great need.

      Jay has no choice but to disillusion him, to make it clear that there is no relationship between them and that their meeting represent only business. Colm’s would-be love turns and leaves in which will clearly be their last meeting.

       Where can such a man go, a man still with the energy of middle-life while living without love, without self-respect, in a household that either doesn’t know how to help him or hates him for even

existing? Colm begins clearing out the junk that’s gathered in his own backyard, but unlike Voltaire’s loving message of making your own garden, there is no space left even in that comfortable back yard for Colm to begin planting things, and we know that he has no seeds to plant, and has no will to go through with the task. He has become redundant to life itself, an unpleasant reminder of the men and women who can no longer fit into the normalcies of the contemporary worlds in which they exist. He is neither heterosexual or truly homosexual, neither lover or beloved, neither a good husband and father nor a truly uncaring one. He no longer even has a truly existent sense of his own being. If as Linda Loman of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, we might even cry out for Colm as she did for her husband Willy, “attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person,” we know there is no longer anyone to attend. Even we can be, finally, only mute witnesses.

       Yes, the critics are correct, Eric Andrews of The Queer Review summarizing their frustrations:

“Rialto is a punishing, dour exercise that probably could have used a bit of relief.” But a dirge doesn’t permit that does it? If only his son could have been less selfish, if his wife could have been wise enough to have stayed even while suffering fear and pain, or if only Jay could have been a little smarter, kinder, empathetic, himself less needy. Such fantasies, alas, don’t exist in such working-class worlds.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).