It takes a while for the film, elegiacally shot in the depressed streets if Dublin and stuffed with local slang, to live up to this pitch. At first, it’s just a line. The manager, Jimmy (Dublin musician Robert Arkins), is part hustler, part believer. He assembles a band, the Commitments (mostly played by local musicians with no acting experience), and invests it with a mission that is only half pun: to be the saviors of soul. There’s something unformed about the players, who join mainly because they have nothing better to do. They’d like to believe in Jimmy’s spiel but don’t quite get it. “It’s much better being an unemployed musician,” says one, “than an unemployed pipe fitter.” As they trace the stations of the rock-movie cross-they form, they gel, they swell, they fall apart-their journey becomes as much spiritual as musical.
The music - standards by Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin - carries the emotional weight of the film, filling in the gaps in the script and characters. These songs are bigger than the lives of these Dublin kids. In performance, the musicians melt into their material; there’s a wisdom in this music that’s still a mystery to them.
It’s fun to watch them puzzle over it. They come fully to life only in its light: Deco (Andrew Strong), a strong-voiced oaf whose vulgarity speaks sexual truths when he has the words of Otis Redding in his mouth; Imelda (Angeline Ball), an unwilling love interest who gives the nonbelievers something else to believe in; Joey (Johnny Murphy), a middle-aged mystic whose homilies and stories may be all talk but sit just right with the girls. The musicians will be beckoned back to insignificance soon enough, but for a moment they become unwitting witnesses to revelation.
Director Parker seems skittish about such a pure journey of the faith. He cuts from the band to a portrait of Elvis on the wall above the pope’s, or to a burlesque of rock-stereotypes. This is having it both ways, building his house on the band’s innocence and winking at it to boot. It makes the early talk of faith stiff, starchy. When Jimmy tells the band that the Irish are the black people of Europe and prods them to repeat, “I’m black and I’m proud,” you wonder if Parker - whose 1988 “Mississippi Burning” construed a chapter of the civil-rights era as an act of FBI idealism - wouldn’t be better off messing with something he knew a bit about and leaving race, disenfranchisement, pop youth culture and soul to somebody else.
But even running through familiar paces, his characters are new and it’s hard to get to know them. In the hands of the nonprofessional cast, the characters reveal themselves in the haltering gestures and awkward lapses of real street kids. “The Commitments” is slight stuff, but there’s a shadowy, innocent charm in this ensemble that finally flashes for just long enough to vindicate Jimmy’s trumped-up faith.
title: “The Lost Soul Generation” ShowToc: true date: “2023-02-01” author: “Robert Carroll”
It takes a while for the film, elegiacally shot in the depressed streets if Dublin and stuffed with local slang, to live up to this pitch. At first, it’s just a line. The manager, Jimmy (Dublin musician Robert Arkins), is part hustler, part believer. He assembles a band, the Commitments (mostly played by local musicians with no acting experience), and invests it with a mission that is only half pun: to be the saviors of soul. There’s something unformed about the players, who join mainly because they have nothing better to do. They’d like to believe in Jimmy’s spiel but don’t quite get it. “It’s much better being an unemployed musician,” says one, “than an unemployed pipe fitter.” As they trace the stations of the rock-movie cross-they form, they gel, they swell, they fall apart-their journey becomes as much spiritual as musical.
The music - standards by Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin - carries the emotional weight of the film, filling in the gaps in the script and characters. These songs are bigger than the lives of these Dublin kids. In performance, the musicians melt into their material; there’s a wisdom in this music that’s still a mystery to them.
It’s fun to watch them puzzle over it. They come fully to life only in its light: Deco (Andrew Strong), a strong-voiced oaf whose vulgarity speaks sexual truths when he has the words of Otis Redding in his mouth; Imelda (Angeline Ball), an unwilling love interest who gives the nonbelievers something else to believe in; Joey (Johnny Murphy), a middle-aged mystic whose homilies and stories may be all talk but sit just right with the girls. The musicians will be beckoned back to insignificance soon enough, but for a moment they become unwitting witnesses to revelation.
Director Parker seems skittish about such a pure journey of the faith. He cuts from the band to a portrait of Elvis on the wall above the pope’s, or to a burlesque of rock-stereotypes. This is having it both ways, building his house on the band’s innocence and winking at it to boot. It makes the early talk of faith stiff, starchy. When Jimmy tells the band that the Irish are the black people of Europe and prods them to repeat, “I’m black and I’m proud,” you wonder if Parker - whose 1988 “Mississippi Burning” construed a chapter of the civil-rights era as an act of FBI idealism - wouldn’t be better off messing with something he knew a bit about and leaving race, disenfranchisement, pop youth culture and soul to somebody else.
But even running through familiar paces, his characters are new and it’s hard to get to know them. In the hands of the nonprofessional cast, the characters reveal themselves in the haltering gestures and awkward lapses of real street kids. “The Commitments” is slight stuff, but there’s a shadowy, innocent charm in this ensemble that finally flashes for just long enough to vindicate Jimmy’s trumped-up faith.
