Film Reviews

Tara Road

• Rating:
• Director: Gillies MacKinnon.
• Starring: Andie MacDowell, Olivia Williams, Iain Glen, Stephen Rea, Brenda Fricker, Bronagh Gallagher, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Ruby Wax, Sarah Bolger.
• Details: Irl / 106 mins / 12A.

This Maeve Binchy adaptation is pretty much what it says on the tin, the poster and the trailer. Two women going through personal crises, Ria Lynch (Williams) in Dublin and Marilyn Vine (MacDowell) in New England, do a house swap, in the process proving the old saying that a change is as good as a rest. It's a story that has been overtaken by reality TV shows like Wife Swap, which similarly shows two women temporarily slotting into each other's lives. It's also the familiar territory of Sunday evening TV movies so it never cuts up rough, despite the presence of Iain Glen (the evil Brother from Song for a Raggy Boy) whose character Danny, the Irish husband-as-rat, sleazily reeks of a hidden malevolence. MacKinnon, a Scot who's made more films in Ireland than many Irish directors (Playboys, Trojan Eddie, and The Escapist among others), doesn't put much of a stamp on proceedings. In fact right from the opening credit - a Noel Pearson production - the film gives a strong impression of a director for hire at work. The result being a film short on dramatic energy and padded out with stereotypical characters and 'funny' incidents on both sides of the Atlantic. Cinema-goers who care for such things can look out for Maeve Binchy's brief appearance but it is symptomatic of the film's weaknesses that she is inadvisably foregrounded when, like Hitchcock, she should have been out of the frame before we realised she was there.

Review by Ted Sheehy