Filming Global Ireland: Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments

Abstract

When Roddy Doyle’s novel The Commitments was published in 1987, it seemed to capture the essence of an Ireland (and particularly a Dublin) that was caught between its past and its present. The Ireland of mid-century, evoked in horses and fiddles and a pre-Vatican II Catholic church, was juxtaposed with the Ireland of the end of the century, as grinding poverty brought into relief new pressures of social change, class shifting, and imminent transformation. Much of this tension is evoked in the music of soul, which defines the novel and expresses both the frustrations and the hopes of the young characters. In his 1991 film treatment, Alan Parker was determined to be faithful to the atmosphere of the novel: as Angeline Ball, one of the film’s stars, stated, “Alan didn’t film Dublin through rose-tinted glasses, he filmed it as it was—the deprivation, the unemployment queues. There’s nothing glamorous about it.” This effort to evoke the Dublin reality of the late twentieth century had a seismic effect on Irish fiction and Irish film. The prevailing tropes of Irish film—the countryside, the mythos, the bucolic beauty, the comforting church—all became much more difficult to sustain after The Commitments appeared. Yet ironically, the film was followed by the Celtic Tiger and the greatest surge in the Irish economy that the world had ever seen. Parker’s and Doyle’s cry for attention to the plight of Ireland seemingly vanished in the newfound plenty of Ireland.

Yet the novel and film were more prescient than initial readers and critics perhaps discerned. For their depictions of race in particular signaled a new awareness of how race, class, and culture would interact in the years to follow, in ways that would transform not just Ireland, but world culture in an increasingly global cultural nexus. Indeed, Doyle’s evolving interest in race has found wide-ranging expression in his Last Roundup trilogy and especially in his work in the Metro Eireann stories since 2000. These writings led to his story collection The Deportees in 2007, in which a new group, The Deportees, replaces The Commitments, signaling a growing global awareness of boundary-crossing, migration, and racial mixing that could just be glimpsed in the Ireland of 1987 and 1991. Through scrupulous attention to the lived local reality of Dublin in 1987, the film and novel point us toward an encounter with the global realities that were just emerging throughout Europe, America, and the wider global realm. This exercising of the Joycean microcosm and macrocosm marks the novel and film as establishing a new aesthetic and political context that would show their influence in nearly all subsequent film-making in Ireland.