Waking Ned
UK/France/USA 1998
Reviewed by Kevin Maher
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Ireland, the town of Tullymore. Jackie O'Shea learns that the winner of the Irish lottery is one of the town's 52 residents. Together with wife Annie and friend Michael, he scrutinises the villagers for sudden changes in fortune. Jackie throws a party for Tullymore's 18 regular lottery players. Only 17 attend; Jackie deduces missing guest Ned Devine is the winner.
Jackie and Michael visit Ned's house and find him in front of the television, dead from shock, holding on to the winning ticket. After noticing Ned has signed the ticket, Michael decides to pretend to be Ned. They phone the lottery board.
Single-parent Maggie declines pig-farmer Finn's offer of marriage. A lottery agent collects the ticket from Michael and announces that he will return in a couple of days to verify Michael's identity with the locals. Jackie informs the community, and promises to split the jackpot among them if they will help with the ruse. All agree except for aged resident Lizzy Quinn. The agent returns during the funeral of Ned Devine but is duped by the townsfolk. At Ned's wake Maggie agrees to marry Finn, but tells Jackie that Ned was her son Maurice's father. Lizzy Quinn is killed in an accident as she tries to inform the lottery of the deception.
Review
From the opening screech of composer Shaun Davey's romantic uilleann pipes to a closing aerial retreat into magical Celtic mists, Waking Ned is firmly at the mercy of market forces. Writer-director Kirk Jones has fashioned the movie shamelessly for a US audience that is both familiar and comfortable with the film's vision of a bucolically idealised Ireland. Although distributors Fox are emphasising Waking Ned's 'feelgood' factor, linking it to their other regional hit The Full Monty, the movie has none of the latter's socio-political complexity, and not enough dramatic weight of its own to counter its over-played Oirishry. The central blarneyism in Waking Ned is the rustic idyll of Tullymore itself - the screen Irish village in extremis. Here, lost to a derivative cinematic legacy stretching from John MacDonagh's sentimental love story Willy Reilly and his Colleen Bawn (1918) through the Bing Crosby comedy Top o' the Morning (1949), right up to recent efforts like Hear My Song, Jones presents an isolated community of aged characters seemingly free from the compunction to work, and easily tempted into playful alcoholism.
Tullymore's closest movie relative in this respect is the mythical town of Inisfree in John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952). Both films are rigorously apolitical, beyond the grasp of twentieth-century ideologies, and both feature villages that view the approach of modernity - mechanised farming in The Quiet Man, lottery hoopla in Waking Ned - as an opportunity to revel in their own sheltered community values. The fact that Waking Ned was actually filmed on the Isle of Man merely adds to this awkwardly synthetic sense of place.
So rigid are the parameters of this universe that when problematic emotional relationships are introduced, such as the one between single-parent Maggie and her simple suitor Finn, or the slightly sinister interest Father Patrick takes in Maggie's son Maurice, they are turned into wearisome farce or, in the latter case, dropped completely. Even the movie's pivotal relationship of veterans Jackie and Michael, which very occasionally echoes Beckett's decrepit and mutually dependent Vladimir and Estragon, is generally treated as fodder for punchlines. Though actors Ian Bannen and David Kelly attack their roles with gusto, neither of them gets far away from a poor impression of the stereotypical Irishman that Hollywood character actor Barry Fitzgerald specialised in in the 30s and 40s, especially when gloating twinkle-eyed over such lines as: "Murder is a mighty word to be usin' at this time o' night, so it is."
Formally, Jones displays an understated journeyman's control throughout. He gets maximum value from his aerial shots - the movie teems with swooping passes over verdant fields. And despite a simple shooting style, he executes the demise of Lizzy Quinn - crosscut with the festivities at Ned's wake - with Godfather-like flair. Ultimately though, with his heavy recourse to received conventions, Jones sells Waking Ned's brand of Irish whimsy as he once sold Mercedes or Absolut Vodka (he worked for ad company Saatchi & Saatchi). What is genuinely regretful is that with the likes of writers Roddy Doyle and Conor McPherson, and such films as the recent eviscerating Southpaw as available reference points, he chose to work from such a creatively bankrupt tradition in the first place.
Credits
- Producers
- Glynis Murray
- Richard Holmes
- Screenplay
- Kirk Jones
- Director of Photography
- Henry Braham
- Editor
- Alan Strachan
- Production Designer
- John Ebden
- Music
- Shaun Davey
- ©Tomboy Films (Ned Devine) Ltd
- Production Companies
- Tomboy Films present
- in association with The Gruber Brothers/Mainstream S.A., Bonaparte Films Ltd/The Isle of Man Commission and Overseas Filmgroup and with the participation
- of Canal +
- Executive Producer
- Alexandre Heylen
- Co-executive Producer
- Stephen Margolis
- Co-producer
- Neil Peplow
- Associate Producer
- Miara Martell
- Co-associate Producers
- Keith Hayley
- Mark Ezra
- Production Co-ordinator
- Bernice Daly
- Location Manager
- Phil Gates
- Assistant Directors
- Mark Goddard
- Neil Tuohy
- Claire Peberdy
- Script Supervisor
- Penny Eyles
- Casting
- Ros Hubbard
- John Hubbard
- Camera Operator
- Stefan Stankowski
- Special Visual Effects
- Mill Film, London/Los Angeles
- Visual Effects Supervisor:
- Karl Mooney
- Visual Effects Associate Producer:
- Jeanett Volurno
- Visual Effects Co-ordinator:
- Martin Hobbs
- Editorial Supervisor:
- Jody Rogers
- Visual Effects Editor:
- John Seymour
- CG Supervisor:
- Alison Leaf
- Lead Compositors:
- Ian Plumb
- Andrea Sholer
- 3D Animators:
- Andy Kind
- Ivor Middleton
- Mike Perry
- Tim Zaccheo
- Jakob Schmidt
- Film Recording Technician:
- Tim Caplan
- Special Effects
- Supervisor:
- Bob Hollow
- Operators:
- Adam Hollow
- Simon Davies
- Art Director
- Mark Tanner
- Costume Designer
- Rosie Hackett
- Wardrobe Supervisor
- Margie Fortune
- Make-up
- Chief Artist:
- Anne Oldham
- Artist:
- Nora Robertson
- Titles Design
- Ninety Seven Plus
- Opticals
- Peerless Camera Company
- Musicians
- Guest Singers:
- Liam O'Maonlai
- Rita Connolly
- Uilleann Pipes/Whistles:
- John McSherry
- Fiddle:
- Nollaig Casey
- Guitar:
- Artie McGlynn
- Bodhrán/Whistle:
- Liam O'Maonlai
- Chorus Vocals
- The Voice Squad
- Fran McPhail
- Phil Callery
- Gerard Cullen
- Colm O'Maonlai
- Orchestra Conductor
- Fiachra Trench
- Orchestrator
- Shaun Davey
- Music Editor
- Bob Hathaway
- Music Recording Engineers
- Austin Ince
- Bill Somerville-Large
- Music Advisers
- Nicholas Carolan
- The Traditional Music Archive Dublin
- Pipe Major Iain MacDonald
- Soundtrack
- "The Parting Glass" by/arranged by Shaun Davey, performed by Liam O'Maonlai; "Fishermans Blues" by Mike Scott, Steve Wickham, performed by The Waterboys; "The Golden Goose" by Kirk Jones, Maura O'Malley, performed by Maura O'Malley
- Production Sound Mixer
- David Crozier
- Sound Recording
- John Casali
- Re-recording Mixer
- Rupert Scrivener
- Temp Mix
- Ian Tapp
- Sound Editor
- John Downer
- Additional Sound Editing
- Sarah Morton
- Dialogue Editor
- Michael Feinberg
- ADR
- Footsteps Recordist:
- Alan Snelling
- Foley
- Artists:
- Jack Stew
- Felicity Cottrell
- Footsteps Recordist:
- Alan Snelling
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Andy Bradford
- Helicopter Pilots
- Andrew Lauretani
- Keith Thompson
- Cast
- Ian Bannen
- Jackie O'Shea
- David Kelly
- Michael O'Sullivan
- Fionnula Flanagan
- Annie O'Shea
- Susan Lynch
- Maggie
- James Nesbitt
- Pig Finn
- Adrian Robinson
- lotto observer
- Maura O'Malley
- Mrs Kennedy
- Robert Hickey
- Maurice O'Toole
- Paddy Ward
- Brendy O'Toole
- James Ryland
- Dennis Fitzgerald
- Fintan McKeown
- Pat Mulligan
- Eileen Dromey
- Lizzy Quinn
- Kitty Fitzgerald
- Kitty
- Dermot Kerrigan
- Father Patrick
- Jimmy Keogh
- Ned Devine
- Brendan F. Dempsey
- Jim Kelly, lotto man
- Matthew Devitt
- Tom Tooney
- Rennie Campbell
- Rennie
- Eamonn Doyle
- Dicey Riley, the fiddleman
- Raymond MacCormac
- the whistler
- Larry Randall
- Father Mulligan
- Jim Ashford
- Anne Bancroft
- Lewis Charles Barham
- Colin Bendall
- Dodo Bickerdike
- Joy Birnie
- James Bishop
- Peter Bradford
- Steven Burke
- Derick Bussey
- Norman Cain
- Margaret Cain
- Peter Carroll
- Barbara Clague
- Pam Courtenay Smith
- Edwina Crebbin
- Jill Cruddace
- Ted Cruddace
- Heather Dawes
- George Egee
- Jill Foster
- Susan Hidson
- Margaret Horsfield
- John Kaighin
- Stanley Karran
- Una King
- Anne Lace
- Shirley Lewney
- Alix Morrey
- Pat O'Donohue
- Ged Pearce
- Stella Pixton
- Joyce Pullin
- Charlie Read
- Thomas Reeder
- John Scott
- Jannie Smith
- Barbara Stott
- Molly Stott-Murray
- Muzci Taylor
- Johnnie Tweed
- William Quigley
- Brian Walker
- villagers of Tullymore
- Paul Vaughan
- narrator
- Certificate
- PG
- Distributor
- 20th Century Fox (UK)
- 8,185 feet
- 90 minutes 57 seconds
- Dolby
- In Colour
- Anamorphic [Panavision]
- US title
- Waking Ned Devine