Guerin's lethal crusade

Joel Schumacher's movie about the murdered Irish journalist achieves something remarkable: it is both tiresomely worthy and alarmingly exploitative at the same time. Based on the true story of the Dublin crime journalist who was shot dead in 1996 by Dublin gangsters, it offers scant insight into an intriguing character, preferring to opt for the more easily digested melodrama of glamorous martyrdom.

A companion piece to the underwhelming Ordinary Decent Criminal, about the Dublin art thief Martin Cahill and with which it shares time and milieu, it is also similarly compromised in its presentation of "truth".

Given that the film received the blessingthrough-consultation of Guerin's family, one must assume that there are no wilful alterations. Truth, however, is relative. Guerin herself collaborated on the screenplay of an earlier film, When the Sky Falls, starring Joan Allen as the journalist, which several commentators at the time (1999) considered was a romanticisation of the story.

Guerin (Cate Blanchett) was a humaninterest journalist on Dublin's Sunday Independent when she took it upon herself to become a crime reporter and launch a crusade against the Dublin drug barons. Fearless to the point of recklessness, she insinuated herself into the city's underworld where a network of informers and contacts brought her the information she needed to fuel her exposés. Frequently threatened, shot at and beaten up, she was eventually killed in her car by hitmen acting on behalf of the drugs kingpin she was in the process of exposing. The fact that Guerin risked not just her own life but those of her long-suffering husband and her young son is fascinating, but remains unexplored. A few casual references to her competitive spirit are insufficient to develop a credible character background.

Consequently, Blanchett is forced to fall back on stylistic tricks to convey Guerin's crusading nature. She plays football with boyish enthusiasm; she drives recklessly fast; she flirts shamelessly to wheedle information out of cops and criminals alike. It is very much a teeth and smiles, frown and scowl performance. She is as convincing a journalist as Reese Witherspoon is a lawyer in this week's Legally Blonde 2. And there should be a moratorium on the dance scene which Blanchett seems to consider obligatory in her movies. Here, she shakes her booty in the kitchen with her family during Everlasting Love.

I suspect there is another agenda at work. The accumulated evidence suggests that Blanchett is tiring of being considered a serious actress. She wants to be the next Cameron Diaz.

Veronica Guerin
Cert: cert18