Cowboys & Angels

cute actors. moral lessons. eulogy to friendship. the wrong way of the shy and naif good boy, not real different by Pinocchio. a beautiful film. or, more exactly, a reasonable good film. who seems say everything. about all. and the choices to explore different circles of life is not real inspired. but the final, like in many similar cases, seems save the errors and the large dose of good and ambitious intentions. result - a nice story about the courage to become yourself. nothing new. maybe, too familiar. but useful as one of stories who seems be a chain of scenes discovered by a stranger on the window to street, in the evening.

It's a low-budget film with little in the way of a storyline and includes some diversions that have little bearing on the overall product. All of this would lead you to dismiss it as a lightweight offering. However, one of the main functions of a movie is to capture a sense of time and place and, in this context, Cowboys & Angels succeeds brilliantly. Even though it was made just two years ago, it has already found a unique position in time that viewers can relate to. It is set in my hometown of Limerick at the turn of the millennium as Ireland was moving from being the poorest country in western Europe to one of the wealthiest. Much of this happened to the bemusement of a population which had grown up on unemployment and emigration and now suddenly found itself surrounded by opportunities it had only dreamed of up to then. And along the way, a certain innocence was lost as a bulging generation of baby-boomers (Ireland's birthrate peaked thirty years later than its neighbours)worked its way through the buzz and the heartaches of transformation. In some ways, it resembles growing-up classics like American Graffiti and Rebel Without a Cause but set in a very different time and place. The main character, superbly played by Michael Legge, captures that wide-eyed innocence that the country was going through at the time while the photography picks up the youthful vitality of the city. While, on the surface, it may be an unremarkable tale about an unremarkable place, the ambiance is absolutely spot-on. Cowboys & Angels is perhaps the most representative contemporary feature film to come out of Ireland during the past decade.

I've just watched this film and I' surprised to find it was released in 2003. While watching it (before knowing the release date) I felt I was watching something out of the 1980s. Even though it may be contemporary, this film already has something "aged" about it. Its not exactly hackneyed, but there is something about the young people and the way they talk and act (and what they wear) that feels dated already. What especially struck me were the hairstyles and the clothing, some of the expressions and some of the mock innocence. These feel just too good, to tame, or too "innocent" to be credible in a movie in the 21st Century. The usual moral story, one supposes, and this time around just a bit too heavy-handed for my own personal taste. The stated gay interest or gay angle is very oblique.

Now here's the right way to do a drama/comedy involving Ireland's drug scene. (Makers of Headrush, take note!) Shane is so young and fresh-faced that we instinctively want to take him on our lap and give him a big hug--even though he's 20. His mother gives him a religious medallion and frets as he moves into a flat in the middle of Limerick. And she's right to. Shane is a lost soul looking for something and/or someone to belong to. His flatmate Vincent, on the other hand, is très cool and seems to have everything under control. We think we know where things are heading, but not everything happens quite exactly the way we expect. Being a movie, things move in a clear arc and do end very tidily, but still this film gets at some real truths about what life is like for young Irish men these days. What seems strange for an Irish movie is its sense of optimism and its celebration of people finding themselves. Shane is played by Michael Legge, whose previous experience playing a Limerick character was as one of three actors to play the young Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes. Here he makes a very convincing transformation from insecure youth to newly found self-confidence. Allen Leech is likewise convincing as Vincent, who does a queer-eye-for-the-straight-guy number on Shane. Also on hand are David Murray, playing a more menacing version of his character in Flick, and Frank Kelly, managing to erase his "Father Jack" image as Shane's co-worker who symbolizes the dead end of a safe path through life.

Although it sounds like the premise for a formulaic sitcom, Cowboys and Angels turns out to be something entirely different. This big-hearted crowd pleaser, written and directed by David Gleeson, centers on Shane (Michael Legge), a lonely 20-year-old misfit who moves to the big city and takes on a gay roommate, fashion-design student Victor (Allen Leech).

After some queer-eye advice from the popular, outgoing Victor (new haircut, new wardrobe, new attitude), Shane begins to emerge from his shell. But an incidental friendship with the drug dealer who lives downstairs threatens to wreck his life just as it is beginning to come together.

Refreshingly, Cowboys and Angels uses its characters as people, not types, on its way to detailing Shane's gradual coming-of-age. Even with its brief running time, the movie feels slight and padded: The story technically ends 10 minutes before the movie does. But the lack of the expected gay-straight clichés puts you in a forgiving mood, and Gleeson's upbeat, humanist approach takes care of the rest.