WANT A REVOLUTION?

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

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.

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.

In a less ambitious context this combination of inventive slackness and intellectual slipperiness would not much matter. We could simply relax and enjoy a rattling good yarn--Braveheart without the kilts, Viva Zapata! without the sombreros--by a director who is shot for shot and scene for scene a masterly craftsman. But Neil Jordan, who is of course Irish, claims this is "an examination of conscience." He is also volubly aware that the culture of violence that has haunted his country's history was embodied by Collins and his cohorts. Jordan therefore owes to the present, as well as to the past that shaped it, something more than the higher blarney of his interviews and his press releases. He owes us--not to mention the fascinatingly ambiguous figure of Michael Collins--a rigorous and nuanced honesty instead of the admittedly entertaining fantasia on historical themes that he has delivered.

--With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland and Georgia Harbison/New York and Helen Gibson/London

With reporting by ELIZABETH L. BLAND AND GEORGIA HARBISON/NEW YORK AND HELEN GIBSON/LONDON