A landmark film in Irish cinema, this beautifully portrayed cinematic drama is interspersed with shards of black humour and acutely observed characters.
Josie (Pat Shortt) has spent 20 years as the caretaker of a crumbling petrol station in rural Ireland. A good natured but slow-witted outcast, Josie occasionally ventures into town where he exchanges deadend pleasantries with a bored shopgirl and attracts the cruel ridicule of the locals. Garage follows Josie’s hapless search for intimacy over the course of a summer, a journey which will change his life forever.
A few years back, screenwriter Mark O’Halloran and director Lenny Abrahamson turned in a rare gem with their Dublin-set drug addict comedy Adam & Paul, one of the few ... more >
A few years back, screenwriter Mark O’Halloran and director Lenny Abrahamson turned in a rare gem with their Dublin-set drug addict comedy Adam & Paul, one of the few films capable of living up to the advertising blurb of Trainspotting rewritten by Beckett. For their next trick, the pair have come up with a more dramatic work centring on the relationship between two no less marginalized figures: it could legitimately be described as The Station Agent as reworked by Bresson.
Josie (Pat Shortt) is the sole employee at a garage in a perpetually overcast part of rural Ireland. A barrel-chested, jovial but slow-witted outcast, Josie occasionally ventures into town to swap dead-end pleasantries with bored shopgirl Carmel (Anne-Marie Duff) and to serve as a figure of ridicule for the hardened boozers in the local pub. When the garage’s owner decides to extend his opening hours, Josie gains an assistant in 15-year-old David (Conor Ryan), a pale, bespectacled, studious-seeming youngster who looks to have been left behind by contemporaries pursuing the opposite sex.
Everything that follows turns on an unforgettable performance from Shortt, an Irish TV comedian who makes Josie a bumpkin-like physical presence - possessed of a waddling, race-walker’s gait - and a tragic figure, for whom one simple-minded mistake will prove an undoing. An American feature might be inclined towards sentimentality in its portrayal of such a character, but it’s to O’Halloran and Abrahamson’s credit that they see exactly how Josie would get himself into this mess in the first place.
Not that the film is bleak, in the main. Abrahamson has already proved himself a terrific visual stylist, who here - with the help of cinematographer Peter Robinson - finds both beauty and the opportunity for numerous deadpan sight gags in the wide-open spaces in the middle of nowhere. Compassionate and never once remotely patronising, Garage packs more depth, shade and feeling into its lean 81 minutes than many more self-important filmed statements achieve in two hours: it’s a major step forward for two of the keenest observers of the human condition at work in the cinema today. < less
