The Butcher Boy: Have Anyone seen this movie?

[Rom]

It is the early 1960s: Kennedy is in the White House and the Cuban missile crisis is looming on the horizon. In a small town in a remote part of rural Ireland, young Francie Brady's dreams of adventure and excitement, fueled by comic books and TV, contrast with the grim reality of his family life.

Francie shows a child's mischievous face to the world, but privately he struggles with the hardships of his family's imminent disintegration. His father is a drunk with shattered dreams and his mother has already been hospitalized once due to a nervous breakdown. With his closest friend and "blood brother" Joe, Francie jokes and invents games to keep harsh reality at bay.

As Francie's family falls apart, his fantasy world grows more and more powerful. He runs away to a nearby city, discovering on his return that his despondent mother has killed herself. His growing obsession with the disapproving and snobbish Mrs. Nugent (FIONA SHAW) leads him to break into her house with thoughts of revenge. But a child can't compete in the closed world of adults that surround him in his little Irish town: Francie is caught and sent to reform school. There, his frenetic energy and grandiose behavior alienate him from his classmates and intensify his retreat into the world of his dreams and fantasies.


Upon his return, Francie finds a job in the local slaughterhouse., gory cleanup work that

is an unusual situation for a child of his age and estranges him still further from the children he once knew. Although Francie hopes for nothing more than to resume his friendship with Joe as if nothing had ever come between them, it soon becomes clear that Joe, his "blood brother," has deserted him for more conventional companions, including Phillip Nugent, the son of his nemesis. Francie can barely believe this, much less comprehend it. His friendship with Joe is the only positive connection that Francie has with another human being. Its loss propels Francie further down a course of self-destruction as powerfully and unstoppably as a nuclear bomb.

Then Francie's father dies and the boy is completely alone. Shunned by the local townspeople, he struggles with his sense of loss and pain as his fantasies become ever more grotesque and his behavior more and more threatening. Finally, Francie loses his last links with reality. Goaded by the callousness of his neighbors and ignited by his hatred of Mrs. Nugent, Francie explodes into murderous violence.

Savagely funny and deeply tragic, "The Butcher Boy" is a searingly powerful portrayal of cruelty, madness and loss. In the character of Francie Brady, acclaimed filmmaker Neil Jordan ("The Crying Game," "Interview with the Vampire," "Michael Collins") creates a unique portrait of a childish imagination damaged beyond repair.