An Everlasting Piece

"An Everlasting Piece" was written by one of its costars, Barry McElvoy, and directed by Barry Levinson, who is supposed to be good at working-class comedies with spirit. The problem is the plot of the script, which seems to concern a Catholic (McElvoy) and a Protestant (Brian F. O'Byrne), hairdressers both, who come together in the time of the Troubles in Dublin to fight for the local monopoly franchise from Wigs of Wimbledon. A plot of this tissue-thinness seems to augur a screwball comedy, with the added element of extreme danger for both of the main participants, due to the numerous men with guns on both sides of the issue. There is no screwballing here, though; McElvoy's script is almost completely devoid of hijinks, except in one scene where the IRA stop the pair's car on suspicion and end up buying a hairpiece. The comedy could be described as dialogue-driven, except that the dialogue is utterly uninteresting.

Levinson's heavy-handed attempts to make the Troubles seep into every scene (lingering on posters, placards and graffiti that the characters walk away from, random viewings of fortifications) certainly don't help; a comedy should be tethered to earth, but not two inches from it. Complicating matters further is the fact that neither McElvoy nor O'Bryne have any comic timing or charisma whatsoever, and both are upstaged by ferocious Billy Connolly as The Scalper - and Connolly only has two scenes in the whole freaking film. Everything just keeps falling flat, over and over again, for different reasons each time but with the same end result. The conventional wisdom is that Levinson is at his best directing films like this, and betrays his native talent when he makes big-budget blockbusters. Well, "Sphere" was a good film, and this film would be "An Everlasting Piece" of crap if (in its only good point) it didn't end 110 minutes from when it began.

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