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| ‘Circle of Friends’ By Desson Howe Washington Post Staff Writer March 24, 1995 | ||
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But newcomer Minnie Driver cuts an engaging swath through these shopworn situations. As Benny (short for Bernadette), a big-boned, headstrong lass who strains winningly against the restrictions of family, religion and just plain growing up, she's a comedic breath of fresh air, easily the best thing about the movie.
The year is 1957. By day, Benny escapes the repressions of her rural home town for college in Dublin. By night, she's back home with the folks. Attending the Dublin college with her are high school friends Eve (Geraldine O'Rawe) and Nan (Saffron Burrows). When Nan (who knows her share of students thanks to her adventurous high school days) introduces Benny to winsome student Jack Foley (Chris O'Donnell), her life acquires new meaning. She becomes increasingly obsessed with this blue-eyed wonder who plays a mean game of rugby and sets girls' hearts to racing.
Her romantic hopes are beset with problems, however. Jack's feelings are difficult to fathom. He takes an instant like to Benny, he tells her, because he can tell her things. But does that preclude a love relationship? He also appears to have eyes for Nan, whom he invites to dance before Benny at a soiree. Furthermore, she's hampered by her parents' requirement that she grab an early bus home every night. Meanwhile, Sean (Alan Cumming), her father's oily little employee, has successfully wheedled his way into the boss's favors and is clearly maneuvering to marry Benny and inherit the business.
Director Pat O'Connor, who made "A Month in the Country," and screenwriter Andrew Davies (adapting the novel by Maeve Binchy) are working with a problematic scenario. The movie, which follows Nan's romantic run-ins with playboy Colin Firth and Eve's relationship with new boyfriend Aidan (Aidan Gillen), as well as the girls' family lives, features a contrived, melodramatic event, which compounds rapidly and ultimately brings the story down.
Where "Circle" works best is in the character department. The filmmakers earn their points with personality tics (Cumming's over-the-top sliminess as Benny's unwanted suitor) or amusing lines. The girls' repressed fantasies, for instance, are stoked by a radical anthropology professor, who talks about sexually permissive Trobriand islanders who live without "guilt or shame." Sums up the professor: "In Ireland, as you know, we have them both."
Driver is impulsively sweet, touching and hilarious as she copes with her new, romantic life. Sex, she says matter-of-factly, "seems like the strangest thing to do, like someone's putting their finger up your nose or something." Dressed to the nines for a date with Jack one evening, she stares with horror at her enormous cleavage in the mirror, then tries to bat down her breasts as if they're unruly beasts. Then there's the no-nonsense warning she gives Jack when it looks as if a relationship might be in their future. "I may look like a rhinoceros, but I've got a thin skin," she says. She implores him to be gentle with her or -- she tearfully adds -- "I'll flatten ya."
CIRCLE OF FRIENDS (PG-13) -- Contains partial nudity and sexual situations.
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