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There are pain and honor in this performance, and they constantly rise up to redeem a film that is less probing, less thoughtful than its director's claims and aspirations for it. The problems with Michael Collins begin with its conventional three-act movie structure--ABC, QED. This is fine for fiction, but history, as everyone who has lived some of it knows, works more waywardly and coincidentally than that. Especially when it's in the throes of revolution.
What's true of the overall narrative is also true of the way its major figures have been conceived. There are times when one can't help feeling that the history most pointedly informing Michael Collins is not that of tragic Ireland but of lightsome Hollywood, making sure that past and principles don't weigh too heavily on a biopic's audience. You can see this in the bantering palship of Collins and his faithful sidekick Harry Boland (Aidan Quinn), and in the largely antic rivalry that develops between them over the affections of pert Kitty Kiernan (Julia Roberts). It's even there in the characterization of Eamon de Valera, President of the nascent Irish Republic. He's wonderfully played by Alan Rickman as a deeply devious neurasthenic, but he is seen by Jordan as the kind of political sophisticate who has been betraying simplehearted soldiers of rebellion since Errol Flynn (or maybe Douglas Fairbanks Sr.) was a pup.
This resort to cliche--the director also owes a debt to Francis Ford Coppola, whose Godfather technique of crosscutting between scenes of intense violence and blissful ordinariness he borrows--is matched by a taste for dubious historical speculation. Seeking to disarm critics on that score, Jordan has owned up to the usual minor sins of historical fiction: conflating characters, telescoping events, making reasonable guesses about unknown motives. But it would seem he has gone further than that.
As Jordan would have it--and some academic historians definitely would not--De Valera forced Collins to join the peace negotiations knowing they were bound to produce an agreement that would be unacceptable to many of his countrymen, hoping thereby to destroy a dangerous rival. But, says Charles Townshend, a professor at Keele University in England and a specialist on the British rule of Ireland, Collins was anything but the "simple rebel." He was, in fact, this shadow government's minister of finance and perhaps the ablest politician in the cabinet. He was not gulled by his President into negotiating with the Brits or fooled by them into taking less than he could have got. As for Jordan's implication that De Valera may actually have been complicit in Collins' assassination, there is simply no valid evidence for it. On the contrary, it is said the Irish leader wept for the entire day after it occurred.