Given how poorly the sport itself translates to scripted, big-screen drama (not to mention the limited American interest in it), the lack of football biopics is no great surprise. It’s very funny, then, that this trend should be bucked not by Pele or a Ronaldo or Zidane or even Wayne Rooney, but by Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy in Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn’s Saipan, a zippy retelling of the falling out between player and manager that defined Ireland’s 2002 World Cup efforts.
As played by rising star Irish actor Eanna Hardwicke and Steve Coogan, respectively, Keane and McCarthy make for an entertaining lead duo. Keane is pure, coiled frustration, the tragedy of a man too talented for his country who has thus, against his own desires, become a lightning rod for national pride and divisive opinion – there is no Irish trip to the World Cup without him and he both relished and resents the power this gives him. Hardwicke’s performance is an engaging balance of charming professionalism and childish anger and entitlement, and he bears a decent resemblance to Keane (as well as a distractingly uncanny similarity to a young Christopher Eccleston).
Coogan, meanwhile, looks far less like his real-life counterpart, but gets to be much funnier, his McCarthy both proud and humble, able to just as earnestly care about chats with his wife (a tiny role for an underserved Alice Lowe) about painting the fence as he is about leading a nation to the world’s greatest sporting event. More relatable than the elite and standoffish Keane, McCarthy grants Coogan the lion’s share of the biggest laughs (his boasts about his unmatched fouling record) and emotional beats, his heartache and anxiety at Keane abandoning his nation played very straight.
D’Sa and Leyburn shoot Saipan with a slick, music video-esque fizz, miles away from the minimalist stylings of their previous film, the quietly great Ordinary People, which works well for the bizarre setting. Saipan, an American-owned island deep in the Pacific, was where the Irish team went for this disastrous pre-World Cup trip, part R+R holiday, part acclimatisation to the tropical conditions and Pacific time zones that they’d find in Japan and South Korea. A travel brochure for the island, this is not. While there is some gorgeous sun and sea, the hotel is grimly filthy (repeated close-ups of Keane’s room’s disgustingly clogged air conditioning unit are very unpleasant) and the island itself is a blasted wasteland – it was home to brutal fighting in World War 2 and mostly looks like it never recovered.
Ultimately, there is only so much movie-level drama one can drag out of this story, Paul Fraser’s script adding some weight with a couple of furious debates on Irishness and the international reputation of the nation and its people but still ultimately feeling pretty lightweight. Saipan is not going to set the world on fire, but it’s a slick and breezy 90 minutes at the cinema that becomes an unmissable curio if, like me, the only thing you like watching as much as movies is football.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 