Toupee Comedy Has Roots in Irish Conflict

“An Everlasting Piece” is that rarity: a film that opens on Christmas Day that actually is in the spirit of the season. Set in Belfast in the ‘80s, it’s a comedy of high and zany spirits that effortlessly touches on matters of moral choice, reconciliation and forgiveness and the value of the generous gesture.

The teaming of the film’s young star and writer, Barry McEvoy, and its veteran director, Barry Levinson, is as fortuitous as the teaming of Levinson and Warren Beatty on “Bugsy.” (It probably helps that Belfast-born McEvoy has lived in Levinson’s beloved Maryland since he was 15, and that the port cities of Belfast and Baltimore have such a similar look and feel.) This late-in-the-year gem glows with Levinson’s characteristically warm embrace of a wide range of people and his superlative sense of time and place.

McEvoy’s highly original tale is set in motion when Bronagh (Anna Friel), the smart and sultry girlfriend of McEvoy’s Colm, gets him a job as a barber in the mental institution where she is a nurse. Right away, the brash Colm hits it off with his equally young fellow barber, the timid George (Brian F. O’Byrne).

Not only do their temperaments complement each other, but they also share a gift of gab, a way with rhyme--George in fact has a passion for poetry. Friendship swiftly transcends the reality that Colm is a Catholic and George a Protestant. When they learn that one of the patients (Billy Connolly) was running a toupee business when he flipped his wig, so to speak, and scalped four of his customers, Colm and George seize the chance to buy him out and try to corner the hairpiece market in Northern Ireland.

They hadn’t reckoned with their well-financed rival, Toupee or Not Toupee, but that just adds to the fun. Armed with the scalper’s prospective client list, they swiftly find out that selling hairpieces to hardheaded working-class Irishmen is not so easy but frequently amusing. From its beginning, the film makes clear that tensions are running high in Belfast, but they don’t intrude on the film’s good humor.

As devised by McEvoy and directed by Levinson, Colm and George’s inevitable entanglement with the grim political and military realities that surround them is a small miracle of comic imagination, handled deftly with the lightest of touches, a splendid example of putting comedy in the service of deadly serious issues.

One of the film’s most confoundingly funny moments occurs when the boys pitch a rug to a vicar, who is amenable--provided the hair came from the head of a Protestant! This note of preposterousness rings so true to human foibles that you have to wonder whether it was drawn from an actual experience of McEvoy’s father, a barber and sometime hairpiece salesman whose stories provided a source of inspiration for his son. In short, we come to see, through Colm and George’s humorous adventures, both the tragedy and the absurdity in the seemingly endless conflict that holds Northern Ireland in its ancient thrall.

“An Everlasting Piece” is a film rich in picturesque settings and varying moods, all of which is beautifully enhanced by Seamus Deasy’s camera work, with its play of light and shadow, and Hans Zimmer’s lively yet poignant score. It is also a film of some notably sharp supporting performances, most notably by Colum Convey as an IRA man in need of a toupee and Des McAleer, who wants a rug but doesn’t want to pay for it. “An Everlasting Piece” is a tad long and a bit rambling, but you’re not likely to mind too much.

*MPAA-rated: Rated R for language. Times guidelines: The blunt language seems natural to its people and their milieu, but it is very strong on four-letter words.

‘An Everlasting Piece’

Barry McEvoy: Colm

Brian F. O’Byrne: George

Anna Friel: Bronagh

Colum Convey: IRA Man

Billy Connolly: Scalper

A DreamWorks Pictures and Columbia Pictures presentation of a Bayahibe Films production in association with Baltimore/Spring Creek Pictures. Director Barry Levinson. Producers Mark Johnson, Louis DiGiaimo, Jerome O’Connor, Levinson, Paula Weinstock. Executive producer Patrick McCormick. Screenplay by Barry McEvoy. Cinematographer Seamus Deasy. Editor Stu Linder. Music Hans Zimmer. Costumes Joan Bergin. Production designer Nathan Crowley. Art director (Dublin) Padraig O’Neill. Art director (Belfast) Mark Lowry. Set decorator Laura Bowe. Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes.

Exclusively at the AMC Century 14, 10250 Santa Monica Blvd., Century City Shopping Center, (310) 553-8900.