This Is My Father movie review (1999)

It is not like that anymore in Ireland, where some of the old customs have died with startling speed. But that is the Ireland remembered in "This Is My Father," a film about lives ruled by guilt, fear, prejudice and dour family pride. For every cheerful Irish comedy about free spirits with quick wits, there is a story like this one, about characters sitting in dark rooms, ruminating on old grudges and fresh resentments, and using the rules of the church, when convenient, as justification for their own spites and dreads.

The movie is said to be based on a true family story and has been made by Chicago's Quinn brothers. Aidan Quinn stars as an orphaned tenant farmer who falls in love with the daughter of the woman who owns the land he works. Paul Quinn directs. Declan Quinn, the cinematographer, is known for work such as "Leaving Las Vegas." It is so much a family project that there is even a role for a friend, John Cusack, who drops in out of the sky in a small plane, lands on the beach and figures in a scene as charming as it is irrelevant.

The heart of the story involves Kieran O'Day (Aidan Quinn) and Fiona Flynn (Moya Farrelly), who fall passionately in love in 1939. He is an orphan, being reared by a tenant couple named the Maneys (Donal Donnelly and Maria McDermottroe) on land owned by Fiona's mother, Mary (Gina Moxley). The mother has fierce pride, not improved by a drinking problem and looks down on her neighbors. Of course she opposes a liaison between her daughter and a tenant.

This story is told in flashback. In the present day, we meet a sad, tired high school teacher (James Caan) whose mother is dying and whose life is going nowhere. He determines to go back to Ireland and search for his roots. In the village where his mother came from, he finds an old gypsy woman (Moira Deady) who remembers with perfect clarity everything that happened in 1939 and triggers the flashbacks. The modern story is almost not essential (we forget Caan in the midst of the flashback), but it does trigger a happy ending in which much is explained.

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