Saipan
Director: Lisa Barros D’Sa, Glenn Leyburn
Cert: 15A
Starring: Steve Coogan, Éanna Hardwicke, Jack Hickey, Harriet Cains, Niall McNamee, Alice Lowe, Alex Murphy
Running Time: 1 hr 30 mins
A tricky prospect, this. In the months since its premiere, at Toronto International Film Festival, Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn’s take on the most infamous falling-out in Irish sporting history has caused a few overseas heads to be scratched. “Imagine if Michael Jordan or LeBron James decided not to play for Team USA,” Gregory Ellwood ventured in the Playlist.
He was not the only critic rushing to Wikipedia. Are there really the makings of a film in what, to the rest of the world, seems just a little local difficulty?
On balance, yes. That significant portion of the Irish audience familiar with the dispute in 2002 between Roy Keane, the volatile Republic of Ireland soccer captain, and Mick McCarthy, the team’s lugubrious manager, will find their nostalgia glands satisfactorily stimulated.
[ Saipan 20 years on: The inside story of the World Cup row that divided a nationOpens in new window ]
But there is also universal drama in here. Working from a tidy script by Paul Fraser, a frequent collaborator with Shane Meadows, Éanna Hardwicke, as Keane, and Steve Coogan, as McCarthy, develop rounded personalities that, though reminiscent of the originals, emerge as independent characters in a factional space.
The unavoidable comparison is with Tom Hooper’s The Damned United, a tale of Brian Clough’s unhappy spell at Leeds United, from 2009. Both films should appeal to committed soccer fans. But they will also connect with any office worker who has fallen out with a boss over the allocation of pencil sharpeners (or whatever).
Does The Irish Times need to offer what Robbie Collin, in a positive review for the Daily Telegraph, called a “précis for the clueless (like me)”? Maybe a few bullet points. Ireland make it to the World Cup in Japan and South Korea. Keane deems the training camp on the island of Saipan unsatisfactory: bumpy pitch, unpalatable food, even a lack of footballs.
The media pick up on the aggro. The midfielder eventually lets rip at McCarthy in a famously torrid team meeting, alleged snippets of which have entered vulgar vernacular.
The film-makers have skilfully, and necessarily, conflated characters to provide a smoother narrative (and presumably satisfy m’learned friends’ legal concerns). Jamie Beamish, blustery and blazered, makes an oily bingo caller of the senior Ireland official. Fictionalised amalgams of the journalistic pack sharpen the antagonisms as a conflict becomes increasingly inevitable.
It would be wrong to suggest Saipan takes a side, but you could reasonably argue that Keane seems a sympatric figure until he threatens to quit the team. It helps that Hardwicke initially gives us a less hard-edged version of the footballer than that favoured by contemporaneous impressionists.
He is a family man. He is a conscientious and focused worker. His outbursts are initially more comic than furious. “You think the Portuguese are eating cheese sandwiches,” he says with a smile during the catering controversy. That early likeability makes the final meltdown all the more shocking.
Coogan has a more difficult task with a less demonstrative character. Resisting the temptation to turn the Yorkshire-born manager into one of his signature buffoons, he instead leans into a quiet decency that opens up fewer opportunities for humour. It is a humane portrayal in a film that, more than 20 years after the event, seems open to understanding. There are poignant considerations here of the complex collisions between different classes of Irishness.
There is also a lot of fun to be had. Dina Coughlan and Rory McPartland, the music supervisors, strike gold with the inclusion of Bob Dylan’s Positively 4th Street as tensions rise. “You got a lot of nerve to say you are my friend,” the song begins. The final cue, which we shan’t spoil, is even better.
So, yes, an entertaining, disputatious ride. Even for those who don’t know one end of a football from another.
In cinemas from New Year’s Day, with previews from St Stephen’s Day