Over the holidays, I had the misfortune of being dragged to see the movie Narnia. To anyone who asked, my clenched-jaw review was just two words: talking beavers. I was reminded of this when I saw Breakfast on Pluto, another cinematic fairy tale with severely Catholic overtones. The first image of Pluto is a pair of — cough — talking robins. Praise Be, they are minor characters whose conversation is relayed through gossipy subtitles rather than celebrity voiceover and creepy anthropomorphic CGI effects. But it did make me wonder, is this truly the era of New Queer Cinema like everyone is shouting, or is it the Age of Chattering Beasts?
Anyway, Breakfast on Pluto, directed by Neil Jordan, is not about these birds but the fantastical creature left on the doorstep next to them. Like Jordan’s The Crying Game, this film is a genre-bending, sexually ambiguous, episodic fable that features a stunningly beautiful androgynous hero/ine. Cillian Murphy plays Patrick “Kitten” Murphy, Beauty and the Beast wrapped in one, though she never sees herself as anything other than delightfully Herself.
The story is a sprawling memoir — Kitten, abandoned as a baby, grows up openly cross-dressing in a small Irish town, very likely the child of the local parish priest (played mournfully by Liam Neeson). She endures the nuns and the neighbors and the political troubles for as long as she can, and then sets off for London to find her biological mother. The only clue she has to go on is the town’s communal recollection that her mother looked like Mitzi Gaynor and was once spotted on a double-decker bus near Picadilly Circus. But no matter — like all other obstacles, Kitten dances past the impossibility of her quest with a breathy giggle, a smack of lip gloss, and a delicate wave of her hand.
The film then follows the intrepid ingenue through a kaleidoscope of appalling hardships — exploitation, homelessness, police beatings, murderous tricks, and the random, ever-escalating violence of the IRA. She finds sanctuary along the way in the giant kiddie-costume of something called a Womble, a love-affair with the world’s saddest magician (Stephen Rae), a peepshow gig as a masturbating girl on a swing, and finally, in caring for a friend’s out-of-wedlock child. She’s like a transsexual Forrest Gump ping-ponging through the historical and political events of the mid-1970’s, somehow always seeing her blown-up box of chocolates as half-full.
I loved many things about this movie, Cillian Murphy’s exquisite performance most of all. But as with other Neil Jordan films, I’m left feeling that the whole didn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts. The movie’s tone is quite odd, zinging back and forth between whimsy and horror. There are loopy dream sequences, Druid bikers, Wild-West glam-rockers, and those recuring talking birds. But people die. Awfully. And Kitten is abused again and again.
