Inconsistency abounds – mortal Steve Guttenberg and ghost Daryl Hannah cannot touch, yet ghost Liam Neeson and mortal Beverly D’Angelo are bonking all over the place. The plot feels like Jordan has never even seen of the haunted/Old Dark House comedies of the 1940s like The Cat and the Canary (1939), The Ghost Breakers (1940) or the various East Side Kids/Bowery Boys Old Dark House efforts, and especially the British comedy Castle in the Air (1952), and that Jordan is determined to reinvent the cliches for himself. High Spirits is a knockabout farce that becomes very rowdy, very empty, and when it gets to talking horses, beds rolling down staircases and flying busses popping fireworks, not particularly funny at all. Indeed, High Spirits is the only major disappointment in Neil Jordan’s otherwise exceptional oeuvre. While Neil Jordan’s other films have demonstrated him as a more than capable filmmaker, High Spirits clearly shows that he has little aptitude for slapstick comedy. Still ahead for Neil Jordan would be the celebrated and award winning likes of The Crying Game (1992), Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994), Michael Collins (1996), The Butcher Boy (1997) and The End of the Affair (1999). High Spirits was Neil Jordan’s fourth film, made after the superb fairytale deconstruction The Company of Wolves (1984) and the critically acclaimed Mona Lisa (1986). And the art direction by Anton Furst (“Company of Wolves”) and cinematography by Alex Thomson (“Excalibur”) make it a film bursting with visual splendors.This knockabout supernatural comedy comes from talented Irish director Neil Jordan. The actors who hit the right key throughout are Ray McAnally, Connie Booth and D’Angelo and Neeson, who make a evilly well-matched couple. The movie is hectically choppy and fragmented.Įven so, “High Spirits” has delightful moments: the unearthly puppet show deluge, the goofy Hannah-Neeson dance of death, the lakeside idylls and trysts between Guttenberg and Hannah, staged like screwball Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Whether this is Jordan’s choice or whether “High Spirits” is the latest victim of that Hollywood epidemic-pre-release market research and shredding-the result is the same. Peter O’Toole unaccountably disappears from the middle, where he’s most needed Donal McCann (“The Dead”) is barely visible and the story begins in Ireland, when it seems obvious that it should open with the Americans. It begins on too high a decibel, too spirited a pace. The American big-movie sex comedy conventions overwhelm Jordan’s liberating poetry, his wild lyricism. In the end, both cultures, and the living and the dead, ravish each other and wind up dancing in the drafty, daft castle hallways.īut in the movie, the opposite seems to happen. In symbolic terms, the virility of Irish legendry overwhelm an Americanized attempt to counterfeit or spirit them away. In classic farce style, the ghostly couple pair off with the live one and the real ghosts overwhelm the phony ones. Jordan’s turn of the screwball here is that the castle is actually haunted by a troubled 200-years-dead couple (Daryl Hannah and Liam Neeson), trapped in a nightly re-enactment of their murderous nuptials. The others include a yowling parapsychologist (Martin Ferrero), his flaky wife (Connie Booth, of “Fawlty Towers”) and a kitten-voiced sexpot (Jennifer Tilly), her eye on a hapless Catholic novitiate (Peter Gallagher). The forecloser’s daughter, Sharon (Beverly D’Angelo), married to a charming nebbish, Jack (perhaps inevitably, Steve Guttenberg) is one of the customers on the unveiling of Plunkett’s haunts. Plunkett is being dunned by an Irish-American emigre who wants to transplant the castle to Malibu. Jordan sets his film in the Irish countryside, in a storybook castle on a lofty hillside, where an impoverished Lord, Peter Plunkett (Peter O’Toole) desperately tries to save his bankrupt patrimony by converting his castle into a ghostly theme park with banshees on pulleys and servants under sheets. This perception may blind people to “High Spirits”’ merits: the cunning cross-cultural satire, the magic, splendor and spectral lyricism beating at this movie’s divided heart. Yet this latest movie is likely to strike audiences, and even Jordan admirers, as a big, crass spectacular gone madly wrong: an overloud, frenetic try at a “Beetlejuice"-style scare comedy, full of gauche gags, contrived romance and screaming actors. He is equally at ease in the realms of the fantastic (“The Company of Wolves”), a gritty-poetic Graham Greene realism (“Mona Lisa”) and the crisscrossing borderland between the two. You might not be able to tell from “High Spirits” (citywide), but Irish writer-director Neil Jordan is one of the world’s most brilliant young film makers.
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