MCI Academic Journal #5: When Brendan Met Trudy

Before starting our next film in Ireland, Dr. Chown noted the success of the next film we were to watch, When Brendan Met Trudy, may have suffered for a lack of familiarity with the accent. But as it is that we have now spent a few days around the brogue, we'd be able to catch the lingo far easier than your average American audience.

The film is concerned with language, mightily so. Brendan interprets much his world through a distorted lens. A horrible teacher with little interest in his students, or frankly in his own pursuits, Brendan floats along in a miserable existence, punctuated with painful dinners with his family and brief soirees of cinema and classical music.

It's not until he meets the brash and riveting Trudy that Brendan starts to see a bigger world around him. The revelation of Trudy's occupation as a criminal further shakes Brendan's outlook.

The issue of class though is predominant, as Trudy's life of crime and her penchant for dangerous escapades increase the more Brendan's world becomes intertwined with her. Brendan does things that allow him to escape his life, his station in a sense. His world is very defined by his occupation, his economic standing, even his familial relations.

When Brendan rushed to Edward's aid during his arrest and possible deportation, Brendan is violating all that he is, all for the sake of the love of a Kerry Girl. He's not only slumming with the lower class, he's joining them hand-in-hand for the revolution. He barrels headlong into this new found freedom, a liberation of all that he was and even the past, a past which weighs heavily upon him. While Trudy steals the famine village display for profit, Brendan steals it to break away from the past; to shirk the old traditions and elope with the liberty afforded to the Irish with the Celtic Tiger.

Director Roddy Doyle loves to needle tradition and convention, and he does so with relish throughout the film. Brendan's conversation with the school headmaster is a fine example of this, not to mention the absurdity of the epilogues in the credits. But even with this particular affect, Doyle allows Brendan to slip slightly into convention again and again. Whether its his constant reference to old movies, repeating lines from it to express his wayward and confusing emotions, one can imagine even his inner monologues are rife with John Wayne-isms. This backward-looking view is completely Irish, a near obsession with the past, and slavish love of the historical. How can Doyle argue a progressive view for the modern Irishmen yet allow his protagonist to lapse into the traditional tropes of the past?

The film is interesting, and provides a number of questions for the modern student and eirephile, but the themes do become repetitive and incrementally absurd by the end of the film. Doyle rarely takes himself seriously, and this work is filled with irreverence, but you begin to wonder how many hackneyed movie line cliches can be crammed into one character's dialogue. It's not a bad picture, but it certainly is not one of Doyle's best.