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Director: Jim Sheridan
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Emily Watson
Country: U.S. and Ireland
Year: 1997
Running Time: 113 min
Format: 35mm
 Starring
in Irish director Jim Sheridan's The Boxer as Danny Flynn,
an IRA soldier who returns to his Belfast neighborhood after
14 years in prison, Daniel Day-Lewis gives one of his finest
performances to date. Danny has come to believe that the years
he spent with the IRA were a tragic waste, killing friends
and ruining his career as a boxer. When he comes out of prison,
he's determined to pick up where he left off, refusing to
be caught in the old grudges. And he takes up wooing the woman
he left behind, Maggie (Emily Watson), though the IRA man
she married when Danny went away is himself in prison and
Danny risks running afoul of the IRA's strict taboo against
any man having an affair with a a prisoner's wife.
Sheridan (My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father) so
skillfully weaves the feeling of life in a war zone into the
film that every detail speaks of despair. Yet, it's the love
story between Danny and Maggie that engages the most. Watson
and Day-Lewis achieve an erotic yearning that harks back to
the scenes between Brano and Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront.
In this film that treats love, hatred, and the possibility
of redemption, Sheridan shows that he is one of the few consistently
political filmmakers who never loses sight of the essential
humanity of his characters' struggles.
--Steve Yeager
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Terrence Rafferty has been the critic-at-large at
GQ since 1997. Before that, he was a staff writer at
The New Yorker for 10 years, contributing reviews and essays
on movies and books. His work has also appeared in Sight
and Sound, The Atlantic, the Village Voice, The Nation, Film
Quarterly, Film Comment, Vogue, the Boston Phoenix, the Threepenny
Review, Newsday, and the New York Times. Born in
Brooklyn, New York, Rafferty received a B.A. in Modern Literature
and Philosophy and M.A. in Comparative Literature from Cornell
University. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Fellowship for film criticism in 1987, and a collection of
his writings on film, The Thing Happens, was published
by Grove Press in 1993.
Co-writer Terry George was born in Northern Ireland
and was jailed there as a suspected republican. He later wrote
about those experiences in his first collaboration with Jim
Sheridan, the play The Tunnel. George received an Oscar
nomination (shared with Sheridan) for Best Adapted Screenplay
for In the Name of the Father. George made his directorial
debut with Some Mother's Son and currently serves as
executive producer, director, and writer for the television
show, The District.
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