Pictured at the North American premiere of “Emerald City,” hosted by Irish Screen America, were from left: actor Matt Hopkins, director Colin Broderick, artistic director of the Irish Arts Center Pauline Turley, singer-songwriter Pierce Turner and actor John Duddy.
By Frances Scanlon
If you've never met Colin Broderick go see “Emerald City” and you can say thereafter that you have met and that you know him well.
Colin Broderick is the leading man in every material sense of “Emerald City,” alongside the spirit of every Irish immigrant who doesn't know where home is any longer.
To suggest however that Colin Broderick is the sine qua non of “Emerald City” is to do yeoman disservice to the brilliant cast he has assembled for what is a tale of lives torn apart as much by dreams as wretched realities and love as much as abandonment.
The 1980s and ‘90s in New York City were akin to the late teens and 1920s in the same century: jitterbug'd, rip-roarin,’ mad-cap with an anything goes attitude to boot.
The tempo, the time and the tenor of each of those quadrants radically changed without notice. Akin to each time frame, faster than quicksand people had to either pivot, swear off their past or have no future.
The thrill was gone.
There are seemingly no winners in “Emerald City.”
Once you enter the down beat to a down-trodden path is very well underway.
Yet, no matter how the remains of the day are blinded by the stupor of their existence - live they do for one day at a time as the race to a toxic mesmerizing finish line no longer attracts as before.
Each character slows down long enough to examine existence and their place within the patch. Sentimentality is suffocated at the expense of survival.
The human mince meat pie is all aglow in “Emerald City”: failed marriages, failed romances, failed lives,
failed ambitions, failed self-help meetings and a suicide or two as a chaser. The body count in “Emerald City” is mounting and a tool-kit for salvation is out-of-sight. How does one take care of one's soul? Is it via art, religion, liquor, etc.? One “Emerald City” denizen resoundingly declares: “No!”
Although “Emerald City” configures the landscape of the Irish in freeze frame, at its heart it is a testament to the truly indomitable universal human need to be good, better, best to transcend while simultaneously falling on one's face, hopelessly lost and fearing no redemption. That's the tragi-comedy, dramedy that is “Emerald City.” The laughter is colossal. The heartbreak monumental.
Interestingly that famous faux 1932 image – staged for publicity purposes atop Rockefeller Center - of men - many Irish lunching atop a beam 69 floors up - is everything “Emerald City” isn't. “Emerald City” is the quintessential counter-point to that fakery. “Emerald City” is real, raw and riveting. The “Emerald City” work crew is flying high in every
way, every day without any facsimile harness of support to their very genuine and immediate peril. Their lives are not
the subject of trapeze-like photo-ops. These men have no safety net, real or imagined.
“Emerald City” bleeds the real unvarnished blood, sweat and tears of successor Irishmen who rebuilt New York many
generations later but whose precise identities got swept up in the Morrison and Donnelly lotteries and sweepstakes mania.
Somehow their lack of legal status trumped every other aspect of their individuality. They seemingly became prisoners of their quest for “legalization.”
In the mix their contribution to re-staturing New York City was so singularly upstaged by getting their papers that the work they did and the emotional price they paid in that monumental effort was in fact heretofore itself undocumented until “Emerald City.”
The building of one man's home/city was realized at the expense of the destruction of the builder and his home/city.
One such individual, Pat Mack, the foreman of the crew, fastidiously portrayed by John Keating, repeatedly bellows to his mates to "grow up!" but as Keating points out he was of course talking to himself, seeing himself in their behavior. In many ways, Pat is the one most in need of growing up in that through his alcohol and gambling addictions he has placed his family in jeopardy to the point “where they're about to be evicted from what is already a squalid enough living situation.”
Keating – whose recent New York projects include Sir Trevor Nunn's production of “Pericles” and the title role in the World Premiere of Laoisa Sexton's "The Pigeon in the Taj Mahal" – is not all squeamish in analyzing his character. He further allowed that "Pat is also so selfish that although he loves these guys (and his family), he needs the lads to grow up also because they are his meal ticket on the job."
Broderick said: "I tried to make sure this was as authentic as possible. There's a certain responsibility here with this movie. I get it right or get hung by my own. I'm relieved that it works and that it has heart and an energy all its own. I am merely the custodian from here on out."
