Breakfast on Pluto

Movie Name: Breakfast on Pluto

Year of Release: 2005

Director: Neil Jordan

Stars: Cillian Murphy, Stephen Rea, Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson, Ruth Negga, Gavin Friday, Bryan Ferry, Dominic Cooper, Steven Waddington, Ian Hart, Eamonn Owens, Laurence Kinlan

Genre: Drama, Comedy

Score out of ten (whole numbers only): 7
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Synopsis:

Following his well received features "The End of the Affair" and "The Good Thief", celebrated director Neil Jordan returned with another fantastic feature. "Breakfast on Pluto" is an adaptation of the novel by Patrick McCabe (whose book "The Butcher Boy", Neil Jordan also adapted in 1997 with great results), and follows the story of Patrick Braden, who goes by the name of Kitten. Patrick is abandoned by his birth parents, and raised by a small family who can't understand his real nature and identity - Kitten. Patrick makes good friends in the small Irish town where he grows, but the older he gets he realizes he is a woman in a man's body, and most of all, he longs to see and know his mom, who left him and moved to London. Kitten, with his outgoing personality and flair, quickly gets involved in multiple adventures, including ones that involve the IRA, but eventually does find himself in London. His pursuit of his mom's whereabouts intensifies even further, particularly when the priest from his old town, tracks him down and gives him precious information.
Neil Jordan is a unique talent, in the sense that his best films, reveal a sensibility that is touched both by his lyricism but also by understanding his roots (he's originally from Ireland). His work is also very much a direct reflection of his parallel work as a novelist. There's a flair for the fantastic and surreal that comes across in his films, which makes his entire film making history very rich and diversified (for instance, from the classic "The Company of Wolves" to the fantastic "The Crying Game"). "Breakfast on Pluto" manages to marry a lot of these interesting traits, in the sense that it contains the fantastical elements, while simultaneously rooting the film events in the troublesome occurrences that took place in Ireland and London during the 70s. It's a film that drops the audience in the middle of these events, with the charismatic Cillian Murphy carrying the film as the effervescent Kitten. The cast is uniformly great, from Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson, Stephen Rea, Ruth Negga and Gavin Friday, all of them making this fantastical story both humane, fun and captivating. Even if the fantastical elements at times feel needless, it's still a film that functions on its own terms, and one that manages to define a unique time frame, and populate it with credible and humane characters. A very good film from a very interesting director.