Contemporary fantasy

Into the West
Starring Gabriel Byrne and Ellen Barkin
Reviewed By Bernie Brian

Take two cute, precocious young boys and a white horse that they have just retrieved from a very wealthy and very crooked boss of a security firm, and you may think you're experiencing a Walt Disney children's film.

What saves Into the West from such a sentence is the brooding presence of co-producer Gabriel Byrne playing the boys' father and the superb debut performances of Ciaran Fitzgerald and Ruaidhri Conroy. Both the rural and urban landscape of Ireland come alive through lens of director of photography Tom Sigel.

Into the West is a fantasy, but its references to contemporary issues of police corruption and violence, racism against Irish travellers (gypsies) and threats to their culture, as well as urban decay save the film from becoming too pretentious and sentimental.

Byrne is currently producing a film about the Guildford Four, who were falsely convicted of an IRA bombing and released after spending years in a British jail. The film, titled In the Name of the Father, will star My Left Foot's Daniel Day-Lewis.

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