THE DEVIL'S OWN (April 1997)

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BY PETER KURTH

A lot of people were asking last week if I'd seen the Academy Awards. "Did you watch the Oscars?" is how they put it, varying the question slightly from the week before, when they wanted to know where I'd be watching the Oscars. On the night itself, six people called me up between 9 and midnight to ask if I was, as we spoke, watching the Oscars, and when I said that I wasn't, that I was reading a fascinating book about kidney transplants, they seemed surprised.

"You aren't serious! You have to watch the Oscars! It's your heritage! You owe it to your people!"

My friends aren't just bent, I fear, but out of touch with the times. It is absolutely not necessary to "watch" the Oscars -- you can’t escape them if you try. I've seen only one of the five films nominated for best picture this year, but with so much "entertainment news," so many Hollywood minutes, I can discuss them all as if I'd made them myself. I know their plots, casts, characters, scripts, musical scores and location sites. I know that American audiences want “smaller” movies with "human" themes. And I know that Hollywood has no intention of fulfilling this desire. Begging your pardon, but that’s not what Hollywood’s about.

Which is why I wasn't surprised to see Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt making goo-goo eyes at each other in The Devil's Own, a film that only looks like an overblown, overpriced, action-packed, violence-ridden, phallus-worshiping exercise in American cinema machismo. It's really a tale of male bonding and great haircuts on Staten Island, with some international terrorism thrown in to show how hard it is for decent men to be good when they really care.

You may have heard about The Devil's Own already. It got a lot of publicity last fall, when Brad Pitt told reporters that it was the worst movie ever made, "incomprehensible" and so fraught with tension on the set that he, Brad, could barely talk a year later. (He can barely talk anyway, so you can imagine how bad things must have been.) Rumors of "rivalry" between Brad and Harrison Ford made headlines, but you'd never guess it seeing them in The Devil's Own -- hugging, holding hands and shooting pool in a soft-focus tribute to bullets and balls.

Harrison plays a New York City cop, a family man who's only fired his gun four times in 22 years. Brad's an Irish terrorist who's done nothing but kill people since he saw his father gunned down before his eyes when he was "jest a lahd" in Belfast. The way they come to love one another in spite of their differences is what gives the picture its erotic charge -- that and the fact that the only women in The Devil's Own are sent out of the room at the first sign of trouble, leaving Brad and Harrison free to lower their lashes and screw up their eyes, respectively, in an earnest, even mesmerizing depiction of inarticulate masculine emotion.

Actually, treating the women like chattel is the only aspect of Irish culture The Devil's Own gets right. The rest is a slobbering fantasy about guns, the Emerald Isle, and Whaht-A-Mahn's-Got-Ta-Dew, all of it spoken in Irish accents so phony you can see the leprechaun on the box-top. (I went out with a boy from Belfast once, and I can promise you he didn't go around saying "Aye, thaht it is" whenever I asked him a question.)

For propriety's sake, Harrison's been given another brown-haired wife -- let's call it the Anne Archer part -- while Brad gets to flirt with a home-town girl who works as a mother's helper in New York. You can tell she's Irish because her name is Meghan and everyone thinks she's ravishingly beautiful, but she's the only au pair girl I've ever seen who looks like she's been hanging out with Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. She's all hair, bone and nose -- not that it matters, because in the end Brad has more important things ta dew, and wemmen, dohn't ya know, jest geht in tha' way. Aye, thaht they dew.

The only female of any significance in The Devil's Own turns out to be a tugboat, which Brad plans to sail back to Ireland packed with weapons for the boys in the bog, and where he and Harrison finally shoot it out, in a tormented finale that leaves them both gasping, bleeding, and gazing at eternity.

"It's not an American story," Brad says: "It's an Irish story." That must be why critics have been calling this shame-faced turkey "thoughtful" and "filled with suspense" -- just say the word Ireland and everyone in America goes weak in the knees. Brad's hair has been spun out of shimmering gold, and he bites his lip like Uma Thurman, but Harrison looks as if he hasn't slept in a year, and the editing is so bad that at one point it turns from winter to summer overnight -- just when Harrison and his wife find time to make love but are suddenly interrupted by gun-toting thugs.

What a narrow escape that was! I thought for a moment that an actual human encounter might intrude on the screen, but I was confusing the Anne Archer character with Ruben Blades, in the part of Harrison Ford's Hispanic sidekick, who gets killed -- can you guess? -- just when he's about to retire from the force. By the time Brad and Harrison got down to their Liebestod on the New Jersey docks, I was clutching the seat in front of me. I half expected Olive Oyl to poke her head around a barrel and call out, "Oh, Popeye!" but at that point the picture ended with a glug and a thump and a lot of water lapping at the hull.

Oh, dear -- I gave away the ending. Well, don't worry. There'll be another one along any minute.

"No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say `Heil' to him, nor will they call him `Führer' or `Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of `O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'" -- Dorothy Thompson, 1935

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