THE BUTCHER BOY

Director Neil Jordan apparently likes to showcase controversial topics in his movies. In his 1992 movie, THE CRYING GAME, for which he received an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, Jordan showcased an Irish Republican Army regular who unknowingly falls in love with an English transvestite. Now, in THE BUTCHER BOY, Jordan portrays the hopeless, grotesque story of the downward spiral into criminal insanity of a 12-year-old son of abusive alcoholic parents who ends up killing and dismembering his nemesis, a mean-spirited neighbor woman who vented her rage on him and his parents.

THE BUTCHER BOY begins in a hospital, where a severely burned patient accepts a cigarette from a passerby. The movie continues as a flashback, where 12-year-old, high-strung, flaming red-headed Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens) and his friend Joe (Alan Boyle) play boyhood games together. They play American Indians, whooping and hollering on the edge of a magnificent lake in Ireland and shoot fish in a stream. Joe’s friendship is crucial to Francie, since his father, Benny Brady (Stephen Rea), drinks continually and beats him and his wife, Annie (Aisling O’Sullivan), in his drunken stupor. In the woods, Joe pledges his undying friendship to Francie and cuts their hands to signify their blood friendship. Francie, however, harasses Phillip Nugent, a neighbor boy. When Francie comes home, mean-spirited neighbor woman, Mrs. Nugent (Fiona Shaw), visits Mrs. Brady to prohibit Francie from harassing Phillip and to vent her disdain for Mr. Brady’s alcoholic fits. She calls Mr. Brady a pig. Mr. Brady promptly beats Francie when he returns.

Despondent, Francie’s mother tries to commit suicide, but Francie stops her. She has a nervous breakdown and is hospitalized. When she returns, Francie sees her preparing dozens of cakes for her uncle, who has a job in London. At the party, a sullenly drunk Mr. Brady upbraids the relative, who leaves in a huff. That night Mr. and Mrs. Brady argue loudly and angrily. Francie decides to run away from home, despite the fact that he muses: “The thing about running away from home is that you can’t take your mother with you.” His prophecy literally comes true: when he returns after several weeks, he arrives at his mother’s funeral, bearing her a pathetic trinket he bought in a faraway town. His father blames him for his mother’s suicide. He retreats further and further into his world of dreams and fantasies and nurtures ideas of revenge on the Nugents for their supposed harassment.

One day, he breaks into the Nugent house and vandalizes it. Arrested, he is sent to a Catholic reform school, where the head priest sets him to work cutting sod with the other boys. Strangely, the Virgin Mary appears to him in a vision, and he kneels in veneration, right in the middle of the sod field, as the other boys cut sod around him. The priest takes a liking to him out of reverence for the Virgin, but ends up molesting him. Embarrassed, the head priest sends him away apologetically. He returns to his hometown to work in a pig slaughterhouse, where he learns to kill swine with a gun and chop them up with cleavers. His gory work alienates him further from his classmates, especially from Joe, who now befriends his nemesis, Phillip Nugent. The loss of his friendship with Joe, his father’s worsening tuberculosis and his discovery that on their honeymoon, his drunken father beat his mother propel him to take drastic action against his perceived enemy: Mrs. Nugent. He murders her with the pig pistol and cleavers. The movie’s resolution contains not a spark of redemption or regeneration in Christ, though references to the Savior abound in nearly all scenes shot in the Catholic schools.

Billed as “savagely funny and deeply tragic,” THE BUTCHER BOY hardly merits viewing except as a clinical primer for would-be psychologists who are studying worst-case scenarios. Francie’s life lurches from bad to worse in a hopeless downward spiral devoid of a sense of the love of God, parents or friends. It is not entertaining viewing, nor is it funny. Viewers leave more depressed than when they entered the theatre. The one semi-amusing element of the movie is Director Neil Jordan’s use of a juvenile narration in the movie, which captures Francie’s private, inner thoughts as he encounters the various tribulations which beset his tortured life.

One of the most objectionable elements of this degrading movie is the role of the Catholic Church and the several priests who encounter Francie, but who appear impotent to affect his spiritual catastrophe and even contribute to it by molesting him. No spiritual leader in the movie offers him the hope of the Gospel, although one priest tells him that he sees the good in him, but somehow Francie ignores that advice. Moreover, the Virgin Mary appears in a spectacular vision to the juvenile delinquent, but he derives no spiritual benefit from even that experience, which has catapulted dozens of people around the world into taking their faith seriously. Viewers can only conclude that this apparition, who curses at one point as she converses with Francie, is not the Virgin Mary but rather an evil spirit of some kind. The fact that Sinead O’Connor, the woman who publicly burned a photo of the Pope on a famous talk-show plays the Virgin may indicate Neil Jordan’s anti-Catholic intent.