Heart-rending 'Evelyn' paints history a little too slickly

Friday, December 20, 2002

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Pierce Brosnan roughs up his charm and "cheeky twinkle" under stubble and shabby clothes to play Desmond Doyle, an unemployed painter and suddenly single dad in Dublin, Ireland, 1953.

MOVIE REVIEW

EVELYN

DIRECTOR: Bruce Beresford

CAST: Pierce Brosnan, Aidan Quinn, Julianna Margulies, Stephen Rea

RUNNING TIME: 94 minutes

RATING: PG for thematic material and language

WHERE: Pacific Place

GRADE: B-

When his wife runs off, Doyle loses his three children to church-run orphanages and is denied custody because of an archaic law and a petrified system determined never to let justice get in the way of the law. "We must not be moved by emotional pleas," intones the chief justice of the Irish Supreme Court in the finale of this true story.

Director Bruce Beresford obviously wasn't listening, but then he's only ever been as good as his scripts.

Paul Pender's script provides plenty of humor around the edges (Stephen Rea's stiff and subdued solicitor and Alan Bates' colorful, loose-tongued "legal adviser" get the best such moments) of the shameless heartstrings tugging, but ultimately reduces a potentially rich battle against the forces of inertia to utterly familiar melodramatic tropes.

Brosnan's scrappy, hard-drinking Doyle is a salt-of-the-earth, working-class bloke who gives up the drink to get back his family. Evelyn (Sophie Vavasseur), the oldest of Doyle's angelic children, is a veritable saint in training enduring the cruelty of a disciplinarian nun (think Nurse Ratched of the Catholic orphanage system).

This true-life case apparently shook the foundation of Irish law and legal authority. We have to take it on faith, for we never see a system threatened, merely heartless villains who jealously defend their authority at the expense of the welfare of their charges, while a wave of public support builds behind Doyle.

It's crowd-pleasing stuff, to be sure -- the courtroom drama plays out like a rousing sporting event (right down to the play-by-play announcer) that brought cheers to the crowd I watched it with -- but it feels like history with all the dents pounded out and the surface buffed up slick and shiny. I prefer the messy unpredictability of real-life scuffs.