Word: veronica
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
CATE BLANCHETT, right, plays the title role in a movie about Irish journalist VERONICA GUERIN, who was murdered in 1996 by drug dealers she exposed. This one may fill journos with purpose or empty newsrooms...
...life, death and legacy of Veronica Guerin are different. In Ireland her murder--believed to have been ordered by drug thugs she had exposed--cued mourning of an intensity that rivaled Princess Diana's the following year. Guerin (rhymes with cheerin') has been the subject of two films, the fictionalized When the Sky Falls, with Joan Allen in the lead role, and now a smartly mounted and modulated biopic, Veronica Guerin, starring Cate Blanchett...
...Veronica Guerin emerges under unusual auspices. Its producer is ubiquitous uber-mogul Jerry Bruckheimer, its director Joel Schumacher, a Hollywood stalwart whose work ranges from grit (Tigerland) to glitz (Batman & Robin). Screenwriters Carol Doyle and Mary Agnes Donaghue are also Americans. Yet the film resists the tugs of Hollywood melodrama. It builds a pyramid of culpability--the street thugs who push the drugs; the middlemen who cover their malefactions with bluff charm ("We don't sell drugs," protests one, played by Ciaran Hinds, "we're just ordinary decent criminals"); and the top dog (Gerald McSorley, stern and scary as Gilligan...
Anchoring the enterprise, and pushing it from good newsgathering to movie art, is Blanchett. She illuminates every moment onscreen, shows the intelligence and vitality in journalistic curiosity, fills out the facts of the case with humor and humanity. Her Veronica is a perky soul who is nonetheless weighed down by a reporter's "burden to know." She carries the same awful responsibility as a good cop or soldier: to make things better, whatever the cost. Veronica Guerin paid with her life. This film would make her proud, for it is ultimately not depressing but--we say without a shred...
Nevertheless, Veronica Guerin is largely character-driven by virtue of its script, distributing much of its weight on the shoulders of its actors. This proves beneficial for the film as it succeeds in that respect, obscuring to some degree the directorial inadequacies of the film...