The Commitments

Released 1991
Stars Robert Arkins, Michael Aherne, Andrew Strong, Angeline Ball, Maria Doyle, Johnny Murphy, Dave Finnegan
Directed by Alan Parker

The Commitments is the first of Roddy Doyle's Barrytown trilogy, followed by The Snapper and The Van. It's about a group of North Dublin musicians who are gathered together by band manager, Jimmy Rabbitte, who has the idea to form a soul band. He feels these working-class folk should be playing music for the people, and that music is soul. This is a bit of a shock to the first members of the band, who feel they're rather white for soul. Jimmy convinces them with the argument that "The Irish are the blacks of Europe. Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. North Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin."

From there, they eventually form the band and start down the road to the beginnings of local success and ultimate failure. The film itself doesn't really go anywhere. There isn't much character development, and the third act is short-changed. What it does have, though, is a lot of good music. Andrew Strong is phenomenal as a latter day Joe Cocker, and he elevates the mediocre music to an exciting level as all great singers can do.

As a person who's played in a bar band, it's always fun to watch a movie about a bar band. Sometimes they're very realistic and other times they're pure fantasy. This one is somewhere in the middle. My biggest complaint was the insulting treatment of drummers. I have never seen a film which insulted drummers more than this. For a film which tried to take a reasonably realistic approach to musicians, it completely failed in the treatment of  the two drummers. Their two drummers practiced by smashing everything in sight as fast as they could with no regard to time. Then they took a guy who had never played before and had him join the band at a gig. He suddenly had perfect timing, played sixteenth notes on the bass drum, used different techniques on the hi-hats, and played great fills. Somehow he learned all of the band's songs through osmosis, despite it taking the rest of the band months to learn those songs. How insulting.

Overall, I found The Commitments unfulfilling. While I enjoyed the inevitable infighting, the egomaniacal lead singer, the character of Joey "The Lips" Fagan, and most of the music, it just never went anywhere. The first half built promisingly, but the second half didn't deliver.

Review by Bill Alward