Movie Reviews : ‘High Spirits’: A Tale of the Fantastic and Frenetic

You might not be able to tell from “High Spirits” (citywide), but Irish writer-director Neil Jordan is one of the world’s most brilliant young film makers. He is equally at ease in the realms of the fantastic (“The Company of Wolves”), a gritty-poetic Graham Greene realism (“Mona Lisa”) and the crisscrossing borderland between the two.

Yet this latest movie is likely to strike audiences, and even Jordan admirers, as a big, crass spectacular gone madly wrong: an overloud, frenetic try at a “Beetlejuice”-style scare comedy, full of gauche gags, contrived romance and screaming actors. This perception may blind people to “High Spirits”’ merits: the cunning cross-cultural satire, the magic, splendor and spectral lyricism beating at this movie’s divided heart.

Jordan sets his film in the Irish countryside, in a storybook castle on a lofty hillside, where an impoverished Lord, Peter Plunkett (Peter O’Toole) desperately tries to save his bankrupt patrimony by converting his castle into a ghostly theme park with banshees on pulleys and servants under sheets.

Plunkett is being dunned by an Irish-American emigre who wants to transplant the castle to Malibu. The forecloser’s daughter, Sharon (Beverly D’Angelo), married to a charming nebbish, Jack (perhaps inevitably, Steve Guttenberg) is one of the customers on the unveiling of Plunkett’s haunts. The others include a yowling parapsychologist (Martin Ferrero), his flaky wife (Connie Booth, of “Fawlty Towers”) and a kitten-voiced sexpot (Jennifer Tilly), her eye on a hapless Catholic novitiate (Peter Gallagher).

Jordan’s turn of the screwball here is that the castle is actually haunted by a troubled 200-years-dead couple (Daryl Hannah and Liam Neeson), trapped in a nightly re-enactment of their murderous nuptials. In classic farce style, the ghostly couple pair off with the live one and the real ghosts overwhelm the phony ones. In symbolic terms, the virility of Irish legendry overwhelm an Americanized attempt to counterfeit or spirit them away. In the end, both cultures, and the living and the dead, ravish each other and wind up dancing in the drafty, daft castle hallways.

But in the movie, the opposite seems to happen. The American big-movie sex comedy conventions overwhelm Jordan’s liberating poetry, his wild lyricism.

“High Spirits” seems off-kilter. It begins on too high a decibel, too spirited a pace. Peter O’Toole unaccountably disappears from the middle, where he’s most needed; Donal McCann (“The Dead”) is barely visible and the story begins in Ireland, when it seems obvious that it should open with the Americans. Whether this is Jordan’s choice or whether “High Spirits” is the latest victim of that Hollywood epidemic--pre-release market research and shredding--the result is the same. The movie is hectically choppy and fragmented.

Even so, “High Spirits” has delightful moments: the unearthly puppet show deluge, the goofy Hannah-Neeson dance of death, the lakeside idylls and trysts between Guttenberg and Hannah, staged like screwball Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The actors who hit the right key throughout are Ray McAnally, Connie Booth and D’Angelo and Neeson, who make a evilly well-matched couple. And the art direction by Anton Furst (“Company of Wolves”) and cinematography by Alex Thomson (“Excalibur”) make it a film bursting with visual splendors.

But for all that, watching “High Spirits” (MPAA rated PG-13, for sex and nudity) dampens yours. Couldn’t Irish poetry and American movies have had a happier marriage? A wonderful film seems to be peeking through a pile of hysterical shards and smashed bits. Sighting the pieces of Jordan’s poetics that glint through, your spirits remain high. Thinking about the mold they’ve been rudely shoved into gives you a ghostly low shiver.