First there are kisses
The Crying Game at thirty
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I’m not sure if I was too young, or just the right age, when I first saw Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game. I was 14 years old, recently and intensely obsessed with cinema, and I stayed up late to watch it one night on Film4, a (then) pay-per-view, and brilliantly programmed TV channel that I’d pestered my mum to subscribe to after I decided I needed to see Taxi Driver. (Taxi Driver was the cover film for the first issue of a new, and very cool-looking new film magazine, Hotdog, that launched in July 2000.)
There’s no two ways about it: The Crying Game is an adult film. Not in the sense that something like, say, Total Recall is an adult film, with lashings of violence, swearing, sex and nudity—well, The Crying Game does have all of those things—but more in the sense you really need to have lived a little bit to fully appreciate what it’s doing. 14 year old me hadn’t really lived that much (school and Megabowl notwithstanding), and while the film hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks on an emotional level—I recall doing the full shoulder-bouncing weep as Forest Whitaker’s Jody was suddenly and shockingly marmalized by a British army vehicle—I couldn’t quite work out why it had burrowed under my skin so deeply.
What I later came to realize was that The Crying Game was the first film I’d ever seen that truly questioned—and in such a canny, artful way—staid, heteronormative ideas of desire, sexuality, attraction, and human relationships. The stuff that happens in this film? They don’t teach you this at school, and they don’t talk about it on the news or in most media, at least with respect. I’ve thought about the film a lot over the years, and in today's world, where mainstream English-language filmmaking seems less risk-averse and more chaste and box-ticky than ever, it feels like a minor miracle that it was ever made in the first place, let alone became an Oscar-winning box office hit.
The film was released in US theaters on November 27, 1992, which means that it’s now thirty years old. Around five years back, I had the challenge of writing about The Crying Game, for the first time, for the BFI Blu-ray edition that was issued to commemorate its 25th anniversary. To be completely honest, I didn’t think that much of the piece at first. It was a pain in the arse to write, and it’s sadly a writer’s lot to be dissatisfied with one’s output sometimes. It wasn’t until a friend and early mentor, the critic Ryan Gilbey (and I hope you don’t mind me mentioning you by name here, Ryan!) reached out to let me know that he liked the essay, and that it resonated with him, that I found my way to a place of admiration for what I’d produced. Sometimes, a bit of old-fashioned validation from someone you respect is all it takes.
Since the piece hasn’t been published online, I figured I’d repurpose it below, with a handful of light edits, in part to bring it up to date. But first, a couple of quick, related tidbits:
Here, courtesy of Jane Giles’s book on the Scala Cinema, is a picture of a pre-sales flyer for the film under its initial title, The Soldier’s Wife:
Here is an amazing picture of star Jaye Davidson alongside Tupac Shakur at Nello's restaurant in New York on November 11th, 1994:
Here is a link to an absolutely berserk alternate ending that Neil Jordan reluctantly shot at the behest of nervous funders. It would have killed the film had it stood.
And last but not least, before the jump: in 2019, I commissioned the excellent trans writer Willow Maclay to write about The Crying Game alongside Toshio Matsumoto’s astonishing Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) when I paired the films for an edition of my “Beyond the Canon” series at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Willow did a great job, and you can read the piece here.
“It’s funny the way things go…” — Identity, Politics in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game
At the time of writing, Neil Jordan’s seventh feature remains unique in the landscape of British and Irish cinema for its sensitive probing of personal identity across lines of sexuality, gender, race and nationality. That it achieves such status, while functioning successfully as a tightly-plotted thriller, is little short of miraculous.
In the film, nothing is as it initially seems, and it’s hard to think of another romantic drama which possesses a higher replay value. Almost every dialogue exchange carries multiple layers of meaning, while the ensemble of articulate, three-dimensional characters test each other’s boundaries by telling tales. The film’s gorgeously literate script is no surprise: though arguably better known as a filmmaker, Sligo-born Jordan began his career as a writer. He won the Guardian Fiction Prize for his book of short stories Night In Tunisia (1976), and has subsequently released a number of novels, the most recent being psychological thriller The Ballad of Lord Edward and Citizen Small (2022).
Jordan also displays a confident feel for narrative structure, elegantly dividing his film into three distinct yet tonally complementary acts. In the first, set in a contemporary Northern Ireland beset by The Troubles, off-duty British soldier Jody (US actor Forest Whitaker, pulling off a North London brogue by the skin of his teeth) picks up a woman, Jude (Miranda Richardson), at a fairground. Jude, however, is the bait in an IRA kidnap operation. Jody is abducted, stowed in a remote farmhouse, and informed he’ll be killed in three days if the British army don’t release an IRA hostage of their own.
While being held captive, Jody develops an unlikely bond with the sad-eyed, shaggy-coiffed volunteer Fergus (Jordan regular Stephen Rea), Jude’s boyfriend. The characterization of Fergus as sensitive and caring instantly smashes the British media’s prevailing archetype of the IRA soldier as an uncomplicated, ruthless killing machine. His relationship with Jody is even more remarkable; it crosses into being overtly flirtatious, at times bearing an unmistakable erotic charge that’s intensified when Jody hints that he’s not a straight as assumed (“I didn’t even fancy [Jude]. She’s not my type”).
In another notable exchange, Jody explains his emotional attachment to the game of cricket—a “toff's game” in Tottenham, but a way of life in his beloved birthplace of Antigua. In a matter of moments, by broaching the complex personal reverberations of colonialism, Jordan affords Jody a more resonant backstory than many other filmmakers have managed for a black British character in decades of work.
Fergus is tasked with Jody’s execution when it becomes clear that the British won’t comply. On the morning that Fergus is meant to commit the deed, Jody attempts to escape while his would-be assassin reluctantly trails behind, evidently tortured by indecision. In a moment rich with wrenching irony, Jody is fatally struck by a marauding British army tank that’s there as part of a rescue mission to save his life. The IRA camp is subsequently razed to the ground by British forces.
In the second act, Fergus has escaped to London, renamed himself Jimmy, and joined the city’s matrix of undocumented laborers; he is casually dubbed “Pat” by his oleaginous construction site boss (Tony Slattery). Of course that’s not his name—but neither is “Jimmy”, although that’s how this essay will refer to him from here onward. As he had promised to Jody in one of their intimate exchanges, Jimmy travels to Shoreditch to track down the deceased man’s girlfriend, a beautiful club singer and hairdresser named Dil (screen debutant Jaye Davidson).
After Dil cuts Jimmy’s hair, he goes to find her at the Metro nightclub, based on legendary London drag venue Madame JoJos, where she performs. Here, the pair conduct archly epigrammatic discussions through conduit Col (Jim Broadbent, nicely deadpan), a barman-cum-oracle. Dil, unable to place Jimmy’s accent, wonders if he is Scottish; he does nothing to correct her mistake: yet another layer of false identity. Jimmy protects Dil from the furtive, hostile advances of a shell-suited scumbag (Ralph Brown, memorably unpleasant), and the pair begin their own hesitant courtship.
Jimmy, though, is haunted by memories of Jody—when Dil performs oral sex on him, he orgasms while fantasizing about Jody playing cricket, underlining the extent to which the dead man has occupied his thoughts. He also neglects to reveal to Dil his connection with her late lover, a withholding of information that contributes to the film’s palpably tense mood. Before the pair are set to fully consummate their relationship, Jimmy is shocked to discover that Dil is transgendered and has a penis. He runs to the bathroom and vomits, but Dil calmly explains that she thought Jimmy knew: what was he doing at the bar if he didn’t?
The morning after this revelation—the controversial nature of which has dominated an inordinate amount of public and critical reaction to the film over the years, not to mention a number of vile parodies—the pair strike a mature truce. Rea, superbly soulful throughout, is remarkable in the post-reveal scenes, somehow conveying in calm, deadpan fashion the roiling inner turmoil of a man whose apparently lifelong notions of his own masculinity have been flipped upside down. It is clear that he’s still processing his feelings for Dil.
The film’s third and most explosive act is heralded by the unexpected return of Jude, who acts with unsettling sexual aggression toward Jimmy, and reveals that she and her IRA colleagues have been tracking Jimmy’s movements for some time. They now want him to carry out a broad-daylight political assassination in Central London that’s tantamount to a suicide mission. Understanding that Dil is now in danger by association, Jimmy persuades Dil to radically alter her appearance by shearing her long hair and donning Jody’s cricket outfit on the proviso that he will love her if she presents as a man. Jimmy’s actions are in part pragmatic, but complicated by the sense that he is recasting Dil, Vertigo-style, into the image of the man he's been unable to get out of his system. Jimmy also, at long last, confesses his connection to Jody.
On the eve of Jimmy’s mission, he and Dil sleep side-by-side in her bed. Dil, evidently furious at the recent revelations, awakens first, ties Jimmy to the bed, and holds him at gunpoint, preventing him from completing the job. Across town, in a tautly-directed action sequence, cell leader Maguire (Adrian Dunbar) successfully terminates his target, but is instantly gunned down. The apoplectic Jude arrives at Dil’s flat, and is promptly shot to death by Dil, while Jimmy watches on helplessly. Jimmy, aware of the chaos he’s caused, convinces Dil to flee—he was unable to steer Jody to freedom, but at last he grasps his chance to atone.
In a brilliantly understated coda, Dil, now back to her prior feminine appearance, visits Jimmy in jail, where he is ensconced for a long stretch. As they talk, the camera pans up, up and away, leaving the viewer to ponder a future for this odd couple divided by perspex, but united by the ghosts of their mutual history, and the liberating power of honesty.
The Crying Game has a strange, dreamlike tone that’s hard to pin down. Its characters simultaneously exist in a landscape rooted in a recognizable reality—the film’s engagement with The Troubles, in a year where no less than 37 Irish republican attacks were reported in London, renders it unavoidably topical—and a realm of heightened emotion, electric with poetic possibility. Furthermore, like many of Jordan’s other films, including his Bressonian debut Angel (1982), and London noir Mona Lisa (1986), it’s infused with a mood of pervasive melancholy, and concerned with the proximity of complex human relationships to violence.
Jordan’s film is a model of aesthetically seductive filmmaking. Consider the myriad subtle, sinewy camera moves employed by cinematographer Ian Wilson which allow the viewer to inspect the mise-en-scene for clues, while not distracting from the action. Notable, too, is Jim Clay’s superlative production design. The Metro is all smoke and mirrors, a glistening reflection of the film's themes of duality and duplicity. Meanwhile, Dil’s spacious, cluttered apartment, with its centrepiece shrine to Jody, is both haunting and haunted. Illuminated by bold blues and reds, it evokes the interiors of Rainer Werner Fassbinder films like Fear Eats The Soul and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, where vibrant design evokes unspeakably torrid emotion.
Sonically, the film is underpinned by Anne Dudley’s string arrangements, which vacillate between lushly romantic and throbbingly tense. Also significant are the choices of popular music for the soundtrack. For example, the film opens with Percy Sledge’s yearning ballad “When A Man Loves A Woman”. The same song was used to on-the-nose effect in super-straight ensemble dramedy The Big Chill (1983), but in Jordan’s hands, Sledge’s ostensibly uncomplicated incantation is freighted with irony, its meaning twisting into new formulations as the film’s characters engage in relationships which transgress “traditional” gender norms.
Finally, Lyle Lovett’s gruff cover of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man” is a perfect choice to play out over Dil and Jimmy’s warm, wry reunion at the jail—a stirring affirmation of togetherness in a film riven by division.
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I love this film so much. This is a great exploration of its inspirations and legacy.
A Megabowl shoutout! Still miss that place.