The Crying Game (dir. Neil Jordan, 1992) — Review

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After an initially muted reception, Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game became such a worldwide sensation that, for several weeks in 1992, David Letterman opened his nightly talk show with a cry of ‘it’s a guy!’. This popularity, and indeed Letterman’s less-than-nuanced reference point, flowed from the rapturous following it won among gay, transgender and broader queer audiences, who propelled it to the status of (at the time) the largest-grossing British film in the US as writer-director Jordan scooped an Academy Award for best original script. It was a rare display of a film which hit the artistic, commercial, and critical sweet spots of its nineties audience — albeit through the unlikely blend of the IRA, transvestism, and forbidden romance.

Set in Ireland and England during the Troubles, The Crying Game charts the fallout of an encounter between IRA volunteer Fergus (Stephen Rea) and his hostage, British soldier Jody (Forrest Whitaker), who has been lured into a honeytrap by Fergus’s IRA girlfriend Jude (Miranda Richardson). The unlikely cocktail of Rea (famously married to an actual member of the IRA in real life) alongside the Hollywood-established Whitaker and Queenie from Blackadder sets the tone for this carnivalesque fable which unfolds around the theme laid out by Jody, who bonds with Fergus over the tale of the scorpion and the frog: the question of whether Fergus is inherently, ‘naturally’ evil, or simply performing.

Refusing to answer the question of whether Fergus would follow orders and execute Jody after the British refuse the terms of his release, the film next shifts to London. After Jody is accidentally killed by his own army’s rescue mission, Fergus is left to carry out the man’s dying wish and track down his girlfriend, Dil (Jaye Davidson). Dil, a stunning nightclub singer who performs under the watchful eye of kindly bartender Col (Jim Broadbent) catches Fergus’s eye, and a fairly typical forbidden love story begins to unfold — until, with an absolute eyeful of a full-frontal shot, Fergus and the audience learn that Dil is a transvestite.

(Via Jordan’s screenplay: “We see Dil, standing on a stage, swaying slightly. She seems a little drunk. She mimes to the song. She mouths the words so perfectly and the voice on the song is so feminine that there is no way of knowing who is doing the singing.”)

The film uses typically postmodern themes of imitation and illusion, throwing together revelations that subtly point out the ridiculous, hollow nature of its plot points: from the English military presence in Ireland, to the suicide missions of the IRA, to the very notions of race and gender. More notably, it manages to explore these themes in a manner which can be experienced as a thriller with commercial appeal — and the butt of late-night jokes — or as a the sensitive meditation on delicate topics, as which it was perceived by the groups which it portrayed. After the revelation of Dil’s ‘true’ form, Fergus returns to the bar to seek her out:

“He now sees it as he should have seen it the first night -- as a transvestite bar. He makes his way through the crowds. All the women too- heavily made-up. Some beautifully sleek young things he looks at he realizes are young men.”

Cross-dressing, drag, and masquerade combine with the grand historical and social themes of Jordan’s film, as he takes familiar cinematic and musical articles, and narratives and quotes them to ironic effect, which is both sincere and somehow playful, detaching them from the presumptions to which they’re usually attached. Judging from the film’s success, Jordan’s strategy allows the film to operate on multiple planes of interpretation for a broad audience: depicting both the gravity of people’s pain, and the comic, ridiculous nature of the social predicaments and prejudices which create it.