Alan Parker directs unruly ensembles and musical performances with warmth and conviction. We rate him most when he lets people be awkward and funny; the polished pictures and forceful drama can be overbearing.
Fi1m perspective
In The Commitments (1991), the conversation earns its place beside the songs. Alan Parker follows working-class Dublin youngsters putting together a soul band, and lets their exchanges stay untidy. We laughed because the actors could be funny without pausing to show us that they knew it. This is Parker at his most persuasive: taking people's ambitions seriously while allowing them to be difficult company.
Music was there in his first feature, the all-child gangster musical Bugsy Malone (1976). The prison drama Midnight Express (1978) brought his breakthrough; Fame (1980) returned him to young performers. His musical films would eventually include Evita (1996), but The Commitments feels particularly well suited to his strengths. He chose it after several films in America, wanting to work closer to his working-class roots.
Robert Arkins’s Jimmy Rabbitte and Andrew Strong’s Deco Cuffe benefit from that freedom, as do Angeline Ball, Maria Doyle Kennedy and Bronagh Gallagher. The conversational timing matters as much as the musical performances. Gale Tattersall’s cinematography and Brian Morris’s production design keep the music in ordinary surroundings, so singing never seems to transport the band somewhere richer. Rough edges in the acting help too. These people need not be accomplished at everything to deserve our attention.
The care over lighting, composition and music has roots in Parker’s work in commercials. It also helps explain our reservation about The Commitments: occasionally everyone looks a little too carefully presented. His heavier dramas raise a larger concern. Midnight Express and Mississippi Burning (1988) drew criticism for distorting real events and favouring sensationalism, and we distrust his urge to press so hard for a response.
Start with The Commitments, where the pleasure of the songs and the company outweighs the occasional excess of polish. It is warm without making the band easier to get along with, and funny without treating their hopes as foolish. Choose an evening when nobody needs to talk over the singing.
Biography
Alan Parker was a British film director, screenwriter and producer. Born in Islington, London, on 14 February 1944, he began his career in advertising as a copywriter before moving into directing television commercials in the late 1960s. He directed his first feature film, Bugsy Malone, in 1976.
Parker is known for directing Midnight Express (1978), Fame (1980), Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982), Birdy (1984), Angel Heart (1987), Mississippi Burning (1988), The Commitments (1991), Evita (1996) and Angela’s Ashes (1999). His films received numerous awards, including nineteen BAFTAs, ten Golden Globes and ten Oscars in total. He served as chairman of the British Film Institute and as the founding chairman of the UK Film Council. Parker was appointed CBE in 1995 and knighted in 2002; he received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2013. He died on 31 July 2020.
