mal's blog

Borstal Boy (2000)

This film is based on Brendan Behan's memoir of his time in British jails and borstals (juvenile detention). The book "Borstal Boy" is a fairly straightforward recounting of our hero's time in nick, but it does have themes, namely: Brendan's growing disillusionment with Irish nationalism and Catholicism, the effect of incarceration on him as a human being, and the development of his sexuality. The movie Borstal Boy tries to do justice to all of these themes and grinds them into shit in the process.

Basically, director Peter Sheridan is attempting to represent visually a novel with an extremely limited first-person point of view, set in a monotonous environment, notable mainly for its narration (i.e something you can't film). He's also attempting to do all of this with the visual language (and budget) of a TV movie. These challenges sink the script and thus sink the film, although a couple of more interesting performances from the cast could have helped it out.

Poor Mr Sheridan throws everything he can think of into the film to liven it up. A little German boy is blown up by a landmine, an amoral rapist tries to kill our hero, a bisexual love triangle is introduced and an Oscar Wilde play is staged. Unfortunately, the film is still boring as shit.

The aforementioned bisexual love triangle is the closest thing this film has to a main storyline, and it's the reason that this film achieves the dubious honour of being bisexual but homophobic. In real life, Brendan Behan probably was bisexual, and homophobic to boot. This claim made some Irish republicans very annoyed when this film was released in 2000 but Behan's sexuality had been publicly discussed as early as 1970 (in a biography by Ulick O'Connor) so they were a bit late to the fucking party really. I can admire Peter Sheridan's willingness to depict Brendan Behan as bisexual, because even today Brendan Behan is stereotyped as a macho alcoholic and thus assumed to be heterosexual by default. However Mr Sheridan managed to do it in the most stereotypical and downright biphobic way he could have. Great job!

"Plot": Brendan has to choose between two love interests - one male, one female, one the hot gay fellow prisoner who's also a sailor, one the hot but snooty prison governor's daughter who appreciates Brendan's artistic soul. Brendan spends the whole movie treating gay sailor Charlie (played by, get this, Danny Dyer) like shit for being gay and for hitting on him. Then he reads Oscar Wilde (purely to impress the [snooty but hot] prison governor's daughter) which prompts him to briefly relax his attitudes and kiss Charlie. Then some pointless bullshit with the amoral rapist murderer happens and Brendan decides to go back to being homophobic. Charlie is naturally unimpressed with this nonsense and takes up an offer to get his old job back from the navy (oh yeah, it's set during world war two). Charlie promptly fucking dies when his ship gets hit by one of those torpedo yokeybobs. Brendan sees the headline reading "SS CRUMPET TORPEDOED, HUNDREDS OF SAILORS LOST AT SEA" or whatever and cries hysterically about how it's his fault and he basically murdered Charlie. Hot prison governor's daughter comforts him without ever pointing out that yeah, actually he did basically murder Charlie and he probably should feel bad about it.

The upshot of all this is that Brendan Behan goes home to Ireland with a new love for British people and a new commitment to not killing them. Especially if they're gay sailors.

Incredibly, this film makes Brendan Behan look more homophobic than he did in the original novel, which was published in 1958.

Borstal Boy was Peter Sheridan's first and last movie, and I can see why. For better or worse, Brendan Behan manages to convey a lot of personality in Borstal Boy (the novel), but this thing is limp and lame. It's a prison movie without the grime and a queer movie with a downright 1950sish view of homosexuality. It truly earns the infamous title of being bisexual, and homophobic.

Check this out. The first home media copies of this film came with a cover (left) that more or less tells you what to expect - charming but ultimately pointless angsting, with homoeroticism to boot. The one on the right however was released after Danny Dyer shot to fame as a host of crap macho TV (Britain's Deadliest Men? I think?), and thus was ruthlessly rebranded to suggest that not only is Danny Dyer the lead actor in this film but that he spends it doing actiony things, not having his heart broken by a callous dickhead who writes poems.