International fame.
Mona Lisa (1986) made Neil Jordan noticeable in the United States. The film is about a ex-con named George that gets out of jail, only to find his stature within the crime community decreased and gets a job from the local crime boss to drive a prostitute called Simone to and from clients. At first they hate each other but soon fall in love. The film then turns into a thriller as Simone asks George to find and save a woman lost in the criminal underworld. Again Neil Jordan tells a story about sex, violence and obscure relationships:
Mona Lisa … was in [Jordan’s] own words about ‘a man and a woman who may as well live on different planets, with no comprehension’ … the film’s focus is on simple man adrift in a world he no longer understands; a world of mixed races and bought sex, where the simpler codes of an earlier age no longer apply.[1]
The film was nominated for an academy award in 1986 and got Jordan the recognition that he needed to get offers from American film producers. Which is perhaps why his next film, High Spirits (1988), was made and why it was considered such a failure. The film is a comedy starring Peter O’Toole as a man who pretends to haunt his castle, which is now a hotel, in order to save it from being bought out from under him. The film did poorly at the box office and with critics. Jordan has said that the producers had gone over his head and cut the final version of the film without his help. Jordan’s version has never been released.
When the original leads, Sean Connery and Jeff Daniels, pulled out and as the American producers … became more and more intrusive, the film descended into considerable acrimony.[2]
This would mark the first time Jordan had little creative control over his own film. High Spirits was however a small return for Neil Jordan to Ireland in a sense. Although the film was completely financed by American film companies, it was shot in Kerry, Ireland. That was the first time since Angel that Jordan shot a movie in his home country.
Jordan’s next movie, We’re No Angels (1989), was shot in Canada. Again financed by American film companies, Jordan made a comedy about two escaped convicts who are mistakenly taken for priests in a small Canadian town. This was the first movie Jordan directed but did not write.
It is the only time Jordan has worked as a director for hire and it left him with no desire to repeat the experience. He remains proud of the finished film, although it performed as poorly as High Spirits at the box office. … Whatever the box office returns of his last two films, Jordan had proven his ability to direct big budget movies …[3]
With movies like High Spirits and We’re No Angels, we can see a certain absence of elements that had up to that point been in every film directed by Neil Jordan. If we however look at where he was working at the time as a young director, we can assume that he was simply paying his dues is a sense. That is, he agreed to direct a few commercial films to get on the good side of major film companies, proving that he could direct and finish a film, so he could later get larger finance for his own projects.
This last point seems to be true, because in his next film The Miracle (1991), Jordan returns to personal themes of sex and sexuality and strange relationships. In the film a boy, unknowingly, falls in love with his mother. The film marked another turning point in Jordan’s career regarding Ireland, whereas the film was shot in Ireland and financed by English and Irish film companies.
Jordan’s next film was based on Frank O’Connor’s short story Guests of the Nation. Starring again Stephen Rea, The Crying Game (1992) is about an IRA soldier named Fergus who befriends a captive English soldier before he is executed. The storyline is known by most people as the film was an international hit and launched Neil Jordan into superstardom. Although many critics found the plot twist regarding the character Dil, to be the “pay off” of the film, as a key element of what made the film good, it deserves a much closer look to see what it is really about:
It is much more complex and labyrinthine – both in terms of simple plotting, and in terms of the matters of the heart that follow. Most movie love stories begin as a given; we know from the first frame who will be together in the last. Here, there are times when we know nothing, and times when we know less than that. Yet because we care about the characters – we can’t help liking them – it’s surprising, how the love story transcends all of the plot turns to take on an importance of its own.[4]
The film contained many of Jordan’s favorite elements: a close look at violence and its consequences, strange relationships, sex and displacement of identity. The film also dealt with Irish issues in a very direct way, which Jordan had not done since Angel. In a very powerful scene early in the film Jody tells Fergus a tale that is a symbolic meditation on the nature of man; Fergus is a good man and so is Jody but they are both just extensions of two opposite syndicates that are not good in nature. They are soldiers, and as such they do not have individual identities and when Jody is executed, Fergus tries to reclaim his sense of identity and individuality by finding Dil.
The film made it possible for Jordan to direct a big budget Hollywood movie called Interview with the Vampire (1994), which was based on the book by Ann Rice. The Crying Game had given him a status within the Hollywood movie industry that granted him access to finances he had never gotten before:
… from the casting of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt through the burning down of a plantation on the banks of Mississippi to a score which is composed with historically accurate instruments, Jordan had access to resources on a scale he had never before enjoyed.[5]
The film spans two centuries of the life of a vampire and Jordan’s style is evident in the relationship between the characters of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise and especially in the character played by Kirsten Dunst as an old woman trapped inside the body of a child. The film was a success and affirmed Jordan’s status as a big Hollywood director.
