SKIPPING BREAKFAST

By Diane Frank

I know they tell you that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But Breakfast on Pluto is one meal you can definitely skip. The people who like the film tend to focus on how nice a girl Cillian Murphy makes as Patrick (Patricia) Kitten Braden. Despite a totally unconvincing voice, and a certain stiffness that belies certain romantic inclinations, some people think good looks are enough to carry things off, either in a movie or real life. By the way, in the original novel, the character was "Pussy" not Kitten. Someone made an editorial decision somewhere between novel and film.

The real problem with the film however is the concept of the character of "Kitten". Intended as something of an Irish Holly Golightly, Kitten is more of a mix of Raul Julia’s cine-noir obsessed gay window dresser from "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and John Leguizamo’s fantasy princess obsessed drag queen from the more recent film "To Wong Fong Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar". These are in turn based on the trope that feminine gay men create flamboyant fantasy worlds to inhabit, and this is why they can brighten up a dull straight person’s house or life. One fantasy scene pays specific homage to this trope - where Kitten hallucinates being a black vinyl clad temptress who single handedly knocks out an IRA bomb factory with spritzes of Chanel perfume. But Kitten simply isn’t a vivid enough character. The fantasy scene has the blurry unfinished quality of an opium dream, without the conviction or moral ambiguity that made the Spider Woman so compelling. Granted it’s a dream extracted under torture, but then so were the dreams about the Spider Woman.

The film is loosely structured around the plot of an orphan seeking his parents. Kitten flees Ireland and the violence of the IRA, to seek his mother in London. Oh, I used that possessive pronoun. His. Is Kitten a boy or a girl? I don’t think Kitten cared much about parts or plumbing or social role. What Kitten cared about was being fabulous, being desired and being secure. Being a something in-between was apparently fine for Kitten. But towards the end of the film, Kitten works as one of the girls in peep-show, in an all women’s environment (except for the customers on the other side of the glass). Here there does seem to be a shift in attitude for Kitten seems to fall in with them without a moment’s hesitation. When his unacknowledged father shows up at the peep show to disclose where the mother is, Kitten chooses to approach the mother as a girl, not a boy. And when returning home to help an old friend with her pregnancy, Kitten goes to his father as a girl, not a boy and is to the horror of the town’s folk accepted as that. One can’t fault Liam Neeson’s acting as the father here, even if one wonders what he was drinking when he read the script. Killian Murphy’s mumbled delivery on too many lines reminds me of certain films of shall we say suspect genre’s where the actors are too embarrassed to read the lines. But La, look at me, I’m being ‘serious, serious, serious’.

Does Kitten live happily ever after? I suspect not. Kitten is a vehicle for episodes, a reason to paint scenes, be they of IRA violence, Carnaby Street London, school days or peep shows. With that kind of reason for existence Kitten will live a happy life only until the author Pat McCabe (who wrote the novel, has screenwriting credits AND acted a bit role in the movie) dreams up some more scenarios he thinks could merit that touch. But if he does, I think I’ll skip lunch too.