Not that the man himself gives a damn, but it’s taken me a while to come around to Colin Farrell. Maybe it’s partly because, as a fellow resident of the same affluent Dublin suburb he moved to at age ten, Farrell is the closest thing to a neighborhood movie star that I have, and you tend to judge more critically those you’re fairly sure you’ve queued behind at your local Spar. Or maybe it’s partly the corollary to that famous Irish sense of humor: the less well known but no less prevalent begrudgery of success (the “God, you think you’re great, don’t you?” syndrome). But it is definitely also because, over the 20 years of his acting career, the quality of the films Farrell has appeared in has varied wildly, as well as the quality of his performances within those films. And those two phenomena have not always been in sync: Farrell has been poor in some good films, and strong in some weak ones —in short, he has been erratic, and where his highs, until recently anyway, were fairly high, his lows were true stinkers. And so it’s been easy to look over his career and see only the negatives —the gurning Bullseye in the awful “Daredevil,” the floundering Terry in the awful “Cassandra’s Dream,” the visibly uncomfortable, bottle-blond Alexander in the awful “Alexander.”
But among those terrible roles are films that show Farrell, marshalled properly (something Mark Steven Johnson, Woody Allen and Oliver Stone respectively spectacularly failed to do in the abovementioned movies) not only could be good, he wanted to be good. He made some interesting choices, where his performances, like his accent, didn’t feel precarious or out of place. He worked with Steven Spielberg, Terrence Malick and Michael Mann. He took supporting roles in between major bids for stardom, and was often better in those films than in his name-above-the-title vehicles. In fact, now that it feels like he’s abandoned the pursuit of megastardom, cannily literalized in 2002’s “Minority Report” which saw him as the cocksure, gum-snapping young buck chasing down Tom Cruise, he’s been all the better for it. His output is still erratic (let’s not forget that “Winter’s Tale” was just last year), but his good performances now radically outweigh his bad, and more importantly, they are getting better. For this particular denier, that trend culminated in a standout, revelatory turn in Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Cannes winner “The Lobster” that by rights should finally move any remaining Undecideds (and I realize I’m behind the curve here) firmly into the Yes camp.
And of course, this past weekend Season 2 of “True Detective” started airing. It’s too early to tell if Farrell will be the recipient of a Matthew McConaughey-style reevaluation as a result, but it feels like the perfect opportunity to take a look through Farrell’s back catalogue, and instead of snickering at the lowlights, to notice just how many highlights there have been. If I’ve been guilty of underrating the actor for a long time, let this stand as my reversal; here are five of the roles that make me realize I might have been wrong about Colin Farrell…
“Tigerland” (2000)
If an actor was certain of a breakout and got to choose, out of all directors, on whose watch that would be, it’s unlikely he’d pick Joel Schumacher. And yet such was Colin Farrell’s lot —at the time, Schumacher was pretty toxic, not just for killing the ‘Batman‘ franchise three years prior, but also for the drastic underperformance of his two subsequent films, “8MM” and “Flawless.” But if Schumacher would not get the hit he so desperately needed with “Tigerland” (which was a box-office disaster), he would “discover” a new star. An odd slant on the Vietnam war movie, “Tigerland” takes place entirely in a Stateside training facility for soldiers before they’re shipped out to fight, and very likely die, in a war that is generally already believed lost. And if it never really achieves the heft or gravitas of other films in this arena, it did give Farrell, then best known as a regular on soapy BBC TV dramedy “Ballykissangel,” a gift of a role. As Private Bozz, the anti-authoritarian draftee whose cynical anti-Vietnam stance (he makes a name for himself finding loopholes that allow soldiers to avoid serving) is offset by an unshakeable loyalty to his friends, Farrell gets to play the most interesting kind of hero: a tortured, disillusioned, reluctant one, fighting to hold on to what little idealism he has. In the wider scheme of things, “Tigerland” is not a great movie, but it is solid and unusually heartfelt for Schumacher, and what it lacks in nuance (the director has never knowingly turned in a subtle film), it makes up for in a simplistic but emotive understanding of the mechanics of masculine friendship and rivalry in the shadow of a nationally emasculating war. Farrell rises to the challenge with gusto, and his innate charisma and good looks suit the part entirely. Even if no one else saw it, Hollywood casting directors did, and it essentially made his career.
See Also: “Phone Booth” (2002): Farrell’s reteam with Schumacher sees him face up to the challenge of a single-location thriller that’s nearly a one-man-show rather well. Despite a silly third act, it’s again one of the filmmaker’s more successful genre forays, suggesting that teaming with Farrell brings out the best in him. (Farrell also cameoed in Schumacher’s “Veronica Guerin“).