The Commitments

TCM's spotlight on the working class continues this week with a movie that came out when I was a sophomore in a small college town and never got to see on its original release. That movie is The Commitments, airing overnight tonight or early tomorrow (Jan. 14) morning at 1:45 AM. (Note that for those of you on the west coast if you have TCM's east coast feed, this will still be the evening of Jan. 13.)

Barrytown is a working class district in Dublin, Ireland, and at the time of the movie's filming and setting in 1990 Ireland was a relatively poor backwater, this being the days before the Celtic Tiger. If Ireland as a whole was poor, Barrytown is even poorer, and a bleak, gray cityscape with a mix of crappy old-build row houses and decaying public housing. Living there is Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins), a young man who's been on the dole for months but has a thing for American soul music of the 1960s and dreams of being interviewed by the great media personalities of the British Isles. He lives with a father (Colm Meaney, one of the few people here who was a name outside of Ireland thanks to his role on Star Trek: The Next Generation) who is an Elvis fan, mother, and kid siblings.

Jimmy takes out an ad in a local newspaper about wanting to put together a band to play soul music, looking for musicians to audition for the combo. In a sequence that's typical for this sort of movie, we get a comic scene of people auditioning for the band who are not at all the sort of musician Jimmy wants. Or, even worse, people show up thinking the ad is a ruse and that it's really code for something else like a place to get illicit drugs. Eventually, Jimmy gets most of a band together (the band members are mostly played by musicians completely unknown to me and not really professional actors), with the exception of a trumpeter. Showing up on a moped to audition is the much older Joey Fagan (Johnny Murphy), who has all sorts of claims about having worked with various famous names in soul back in the day as a session musician, only quitting to look after an ailing mother.

The band rehearses and goes into debt to get extra instruments, and eventually gets its first gig at a local Catholic parish hall that's holding a rally against illegal drugs. The gig goes well enough at first, although in a bit of humor again the amp blows sending one of the members to the emergency room. But the band starts to get more gigs, and eventually playing gigs. But as the band begins to get more known around town, the various members' egos begin to grow, with all sorts of conflicts between various members since it's to be expected in a 12-member band that they're not all going to be a dozen best friends.

Matters come to a head when the band's lead vocalist, Deco Cuffe, mentions that he's got an offer for a contract with a label, although it's not for the band as a whole. Also, Joey Fagan's stories lead him to say that he knew Wilson Pickett, who is on tour with a stop in Dublin. Perhaps he might be able to get Pickett to jam with the band. Surely everybody else has to be thinking that this is BS, but then they're desperate enough for success that they seem willing to go along with it.

The Commitments is, in some ways, an extremely formulaic movie, at least in the sense that it's got a lot of the tropes of movies about commercial musicians and you can probably guess mostly where the movie is going to end up, especially if you remember the old Bryan Adams song "Summer of '69". And yet the movie became a sleeper hit upon original release, and has a reputation of a bit of a cult classic today because of what the movie represents for the people of working class Ireland. Having watched it, it's easy to see why. Despite the plot, The Commitments tells a familiar story in an extremely entertaining way, combined with some pretty darn good musicianship. The singer playing Deco was only 17 at the time of filming, but then there were some surprisingly young white soul singers back in the 60s too. If you've heard the Box Tops' song "The Letter", lead singer Alex Chilton was a teenager. Over in the UK, Steve Winwood had just turned 18 when he recorded "Gimme Some Lovin'" with the Spencer Davis Group.

The Commitments is charming, and one that's absolutely worth watching if you haven't seen it before.