Colm Meaney gives Stephen Frears’s family comedy its warmth and much of its bite. Roddy Doyle’s writing makes the household worth spending time with, though its generosity sometimes lets the family off too lightly.
Stephen Frears’s The Snapper is a funny, warm family comedy with one substantial reservation: it is sometimes too ready to forgive the people it understands. Roddy Doyle adapts his own novel, and the family exchanges and barroom conversations give him plenty of opportunities to enjoy the way people talk. Frears lets that enjoyment carry the film. The Curleys do not need to be exceptional to hold our attention. Their troubles matter because the writing takes their feelings seriously, even when they are being ridiculous.
Colm Meaney’s Dessie Curley is the chief reason this works. He makes an exasperated father funny without making fatherhood itself seem foolish, and allows affection to complicate the irritation. We laughed at Dessie’s exasperation with his family, then found ourselves feeling protective of him. Meaney lets us recognise the effort of a man trying to manage feelings he cannot comfortably reconcile; the laughter never requires us to think him stupid.
Tina Kellegher, as Sharon, and Ruth McCabe, as Kay, give the Curley household life beyond Dessie’s troubles. The ensemble scenes are pleasurable because the people in them retain their own concerns. Nobody needs to stand outside the family and explain its appeal. Yet Meaney’s prominence also makes us notice how readily the film understands its father, and how much less closely it examines what is expected of its women.
Oliver Stapleton’s cinematography is well judged for this material: the family scenes hold our attention on the people and their responses. Mark Geraghty’s production design gives the household a convincing ordinariness, which is essential to the comedy. We have to believe in the place before we can enjoy hearing everyone discuss its private business. The visual work supports that belief without asking us to admire the surroundings, and the lack of fuss suits Frears’s attention to the actors.
Mick Audsley’s editing gives the talk enough space to be enjoyable in itself, and the barroom conversations never feel like mere delays between important events. At 95 minutes, this is a film with time for company but little appetite for making a ceremony of it. Stanley Myers’s music adds to the warmth, although the performances have already done most of that work. The rhythm is relaxed enough to let affection register without draining the comedy of its bluntness.
The reservation concerns the limits of that kindness. Doyle and Frears show more interest in getting us to love the household than in examining the pressures around it, particularly religion and the unequal demands placed on women. A comedy need not stop for a sociological lecture. It does, however, lose something when family affection makes difficult questions seem adequately dealt with. The Curleys are believable company, but the film can be reluctant to let our enjoyment of them become uncomfortable for long.
Family comedies often ask us to accept warmth simply because the characters share a surname; here Doyle’s writing and the actors’ attention to one another earn it. Frears also allows distress to remain part of the comedy, which keeps the good humour from becoming exhausting. Watch it for Meaney, and leave enough quiet to hear the rest of the family.
