FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Not wrestling Trojan Eddie
Well acted drama leaves viewer wanting action
Review by D. ChristensenTrojan Eddie
Starring Stephen Rea, Richard Harris and Aislin McGuckin
Directed by Gillies MackinnonTrojan Eddie is a con man desperately looking for the Midas touch. As portrayed by Stephen Rea, Eddie is a two bit huckster who wears his loser's status on his hound dog face. Whether it's his sluttish ex-wife or the powerful head of the local Irish "traveler" community, people walk all over him knowing that he doesn't have the nerve to do anything about it. Of course, this being a Gillies Mackinnon film, Eddie eventually does work up the gumption and if we're not exactly surprised by the transformation, at least the path to it is an engaging, if ultimately flawed, journey.
Mackinnon's earlier films, like Small Faces and The Playboys, all centered on rumpled characters at the margins of society who let others dictate their lives. For Trojan Eddie, that means just about everyone in the film. He hustles cheap goods for 70-year-old John Power (Richard Harris), the godfather of the local Romany Travelers. But Eddie's ability to hock just about anything means little to Power and his clique, where Eddie is despised as a "townie." So, in a fit less of pique than of bitterness, Eddie decides to help Dermot, Power's nephew, run away with Power's new 18-year-old bride, Kathleen, on the condition that he be cut in for a share of the $25,000 dowry.
It's a measure of the films unsentimentality that Mackinnon never plays this May / December romance as arch. Power's blustery presence and nostalgia for the road doesn't fool anyone, least of all Kathleen; he's an infatuated old man yearning after a girl who resembles his dead wife. It's an appealing role for Harris, who has often been accused of bluster himself. As Power, he wears his elderly years on his thin frame and as the film proceeds, seems to physically shrink in stature, the arrogance quietly slipping away. By the end, he's reduced to wincing at Trojan Eddie's big screen advertisements as his former protégé runs away with the spoon.
But this friction between Harris and Rea, with the hint that it may erupt in violence, never develops into anything more than a low level conflict (the promised violent confrontation comes elsewhere, between two minor characters who stand for the seedy side of Power and Eddie). Short-circuiting the violence works against expectations, always a good sign, but at the end you're left with a hollow feeling that too much time has been spent on subplots at the expense of these two absorbing characters. The battle between Eddie and Power, while never epic, resolves itself on a note of banality quite at odds with the strangeness of the set-up. The townie gets the better of the godfather, but the victory feels dramatically inchoate. It's a hole that leaves you wincing along with Harris at the end of the film.
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