Like those other great military geniuses of 20th century revolution--Trotsky, Zapata, Guevara--Ireland's Michael Collins comes to a mean, messy and untimely end, a victim of assassination and, in a larger sense, the victim of his own romantic reputation. But unlike these men, with whom he was completely comparable in the cunning and charisma that are invaluable in rallying the armies of the night in wars of liberation, he has remained a stubbornly obscure figure.
Even in his native land he is more shadowy myth figure than living historical presence. Maybe that's because he died when he was only 31 years old, his work and personality still unfinished, therefore not fully knowable or easily summarizable. Maybe it's because Ireland, despite its bloody history, is a conservative country, uncomfortable in its debt to a founding father whose greatest gift was for violence. And maybe all that is about to change. For Michael Collins the enigma is now Michael Collins the movie--a $30 million epic by writer-director Neil Jordan, auteur previously of The Crying Game and currently firm in his insistence that he has made "a very true film" about a man in whose life, he says, one can read everything "that formed the north and south of Ireland today."
Jordan is nothing if not ambitious, but he does have a great subject. For it was Collins who, in the aftermath of the disastrous Easter Rising of 1916, which proved the hopelessness of open confrontation with Britain's occupying army, virtually invented urban guerrilla warfare, in effect writing the Ur-text on hit-and-run terrorism on Dublin's jostling streets. His work influenced generations of rebels everywhere. Then, having brought the British to their knees--and to the bargaining table--Collins in 1921 helped to negotiate the peace settlement that established the Irish Free State but failed to win full independence for his country and acquiesced in the partition between the Protestant North and the Catholic South. This flawed agreement, which Collins persuasively argued was the best attainable at the time, led first to civil war, then to his own death in an ambush and, finally, to the bloody, endless tragedy that is modern Irish history.
In some very obvious ways, Jordan has told this story well (the film is keenly anticipated in Ireland, where it will enjoy a Jurassic Park-style wide release; the distributor, Warner Bros., is understandably more skittish about its reception in Britain). Jordan's reconstruction of revolutionary Dublin is visually impressive and historically persuasive. His take on Collins is, in its way, equally attractive, if somewhat less than fully dimensional. Collins is presented as revolutionary warriors generally are by their admirers: as a practical soldier, a man of rough humor, mostly inarticulate idealism and, perhaps, a certain unspoken regret about that "talent for mayhem" (as he puts it), which is as much burden as gift. And he is embodied by Liam Neeson, who is near perfect in the role. There is an old-fashioned romanticism to the actor, a mysterious darkness beneath the dashing surface of this performance. Something behind Neeson's eyes hints at an authentic sadness about the center's failure to hold, real rue about the violence with which things are falling apart--and about Collins' complicity in loosing "mere anarchy" upon the world.