Review: 'Breakfast on Pluto' entertaining, insightful

“The Crying Game” raised ire and eyebrows far and wide. It remains one of the most original films to be embraced by Hollywood in a good long while.

Jordan keeps his stride intact - and explores many of the same themes - with his latest effort, “Breakfast on Pluto.”

It's a film that is at times hilarious, melancholy and wildly aphoristic. You probably don't know anyone like Patrick “Kitten” Braden, but even if you're a devout homophobe, you cannot help but like, maybe even love, this character.

Cillian Murphy, the young actor best known for his performance as The Scarecrow in “Batman Begins,” inhabits the role of Kitten Braden to the point of making the film seem like it could be a documentary.

Patrick/Patricia/Kitten is an orphan left on the doorstep of Father Bernard's (Liam Neeson) rectory in the early 1960s. He's raised by a harsh foster mum who discovers Patrick trying on dresses at an early age.

“I'll walk you up and down the streets before the whole town in disgrace,” she screams.

Patrick's reply is, “Promise?”

That pretty much sets the tone for the child's future.

Jordan's screenplay, based on the novel by Patrick McCabe, comes across as a new millennium version of a Charles Dickens novel. The trials and tribulations that beset poor Patrick are akin to those of Oliver Twist or Pip in “Great Expectations.”

Jordan adapted McCabe before when he made “The Butcher Boy” in 1997, and he seems to have a great affinity for the author's work.

Patrick grows up in the Irish town of Tyreelin and is consumed by a passion to find his birth mother. The only thing he seems to know about her is that she looks like Mitzy Gaynor.

As he becomes of age he heads off to London in search of not only his mother, but of himself.

Besides the Dickens comparisons, “Breakfast on Pluto” brings to mind Voltaire's “Candide.” That book was referred to by the author - and subtitled “Optimism.” It was an ironic, somewhat cynical description.

Jordan's film is much the same and borrows from Voltaire's clever use of chapter titles.

There are more than 30 in the film.

And Patrick's wide-eyed innocence in a world gone completely mad is much the same as Candide experiences in his tumultuous, far-flung journey.

The subject matter at the core of “Breakfast on Pluto” may make some viewers uncomfortable, but it is an incredibly entertaining and insightful film.

What's Springfield coming to, having “Brokeback Mountain” and “Breakfast on Pluto” running at the same time?

Shocking.

Jim Wunderle owns Wunderle Sound Services and is a Springfield free-lance writer and musician.