The Conscience of the Kings

Director Tom Collins (Bogwoman) adapts Jimmy Murphy’s play ‘The Kings of the Kilburn High Road’ for this sad, lonely film about four middle-aged Irish ‘paddies’ in London who are brought together again to bury a friend who has been found dead on the Tube tracks. After a poetic opening, where two red-sailed hookers slice through the Galway water, we meet the gang of friends as they gather in London to pay their respects to Jackie (Sean O Tárpaigh). Back in 1977, the friends had emigrated together to London from the West, jostling each other excitedly as they boarded the ferry in an 8mm blur of black sea, grey stone and heavy Aran knit. Thirty years on, only Joe (Colm Meany) has achieved success with his construction company, now employing a new generation of economic migrants. He has lost touch with his friends, separated by accomplishment and post codes and unable to face them without the courage a line of cocaine brings. They too have their own dependencies, Jap (Donal O'Kelly) and Git (Brendan Conroy) are transient drunks, scrabbling around their boxy flat for the money to buy a drink while Mairtin (Barry Barnes), pours his bottle down the sink in an effort to save his crumbling marriage. The sole voice of sanity and reason, Shay (Donncha Crowley), a modest vegetable seller, is the one who takes charge of Jackie’s funeral arrangements, meeting his grieving father Micil (Peadar O'Treasaigh) to bring him to the church and waiting with him while the coffin is flown back to Ireland.

It is odd, initially, to hear these men speak Irish to each other on the streets of London. The fluency of the language, it’s own idiom and intonation, sits uneasily with what the men have to say to one another; a long-playing mix of platitude, bravado and bullshit. Collins cuts this with sharp moments of quiet devastation, like when Micil takes his son’s few possessions, a life contained in two cardboard boxes, or when Jap can no longer contain his anger and disgust and cracks, railing against his friends and against himself. Against a backdrop of neon shamrocks and smuggled poitín, the story allows the men nowhere to hide from one another, rawly dissecting their characters and their hard lives by herding them into a corner and peeling away their facades. Jap and Git cannot hide being lost, so are easily corralled. Mairtin’s tendency towards grand gestures cannot hide his own loathing, of himself and his disease. For all his cocaine-tweaked swagger, Joe carries his guilt with him like a pocket full of loose change, his will to succeed tempered by his guilt at leaving his friends behind. Meany plays Joe extraordinarily well, capturing his self-importance and his self-disgust in a series of early grace notes that have him do little more than stare into the distance, drowning in thought, or sitting in his car caressing the leather steering wheel.

Collins has the skills needed to distinguish his film from it’s theatrical origins, filtering his flashbacks with a nostalgic grain and snaking his hand-held camera through his gathered cast, filling the screen with their hard, lined faces. This is confident, assured direction that captures the essence of the city street and the far shore. Kings does feel decidedly stage-bound later, as the men gather in a pub back room and drink, but what these scenes lose in scope they gain in intensity as old hostilities are revived in whiskey and regret. Here, at the heart of the film, everything darkens; the light, the language, the actors faces, as Collins delivers his scathing assessment of his emigrant friends; their sentimentality, deep-rooted bitterness, their dependencies and their cowardice in the face of disappointment. Kings, recently selected as the Irish entry for the Foreign Language Oscar, is a moving, involving film, economically told and burnished with outstanding performances. It’s is not a likable portrait, but it is an honest one.