Plot
The film is set Ireland in the early 1960s in the small town of Clones. Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens) is a 12-year-old boy whose imagination is fuelled by television - aliens, communists, the Atomic Age. When his mother (Aisling O'Sullivan) suffers a nervous breakdown, he is left in the care of his father (Stephen Rea), an emotionally distant and ill-tempered alcoholic. Francie spends most of his time with his best friend Joe Purcell (Alan Boyle) talking about "gangsters, cowboys and Indians, comic-book monsters and the early-1960s threat of nuclear annihilation." However, when Francie's growing conflict with another boy, Phillip Nugent (Andrew Fullerton), and his mother (Fiona Shaw) begins to go too far, he ends up at reform school. Here, he is molested by a priest (Milo O'Shea), and finds solace only in his fantasies about a foul-mouthed Virgin Mary (Sinéad O'Connor). He returns home to find that his mother has committed suicide, Joe has outgrown him, and that his father has drunk himself to death. Faced with being left completely alone in the world, he loses his grip on reality and lashes out with uncontrollable brutality, which shocks his provincial hometown.
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Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)