Gabriel Byrne

Spotlight By: Stephen Snart
StephenSnart@TheCinemaSource.com

Gabriel Byrne may be best remembered as the most likely candidate to be the enigmatic Keyser Soze in the cult classic crime mystery The Usual Suspects. But the Irish actor is also a Tony-award nominated veteran of stage and screen who has worked with such acclaimed film directors as Wim Wenders, Michael Mann, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmush and the Coen Brothers. His latest film, Jindabyne, is a contemplative and stirring human drama about what it means to take responsibility for one's actions.

In the film, Byrne plays Stewart Kane, a husband (to costar Laura Linney) and father who discovers the mutilated body of a dead girl while on a fishing trip with three of his friends. When asked about the film's plot, steely eyed and solemn, Byrne states matter of fact, 'I suppose the central story point ' for want of a better description of it ' is when the men find the body. From the men's perspective what they do is have a very brief discussion about what the best thing to do is: From a logical and practical point of view, only from a logical and practical point of view, they decide by the time they get back to report this incident, the girl will be washed over the cliffs or some other indignity.'

So, instead, the men decide to tie her foot to a log and continue their weekend of fishing as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. When they leave the river as previously planned, they inform the authorities of what happened and are met with harsh criticism for their actions. Byrne details how this plot movement marks a specific effect on the role of spectatorship. 'That brings up questions for an audience' what would I do in that situation' Would I have behaved differently' If it had been three women who found the body would they have reacted differently' If it had been a young boy would [he] have reacted differently''

As Byrne indicates, the film postulates at great length about the differences of gender. 'The film opens up into an examination of how women react to trauma and crisis and how men do. The men become silent and withdrawn and distant' and defensive,' he adds after a moment's contemplation. 'And the women, as has been proved up to that moment, confront the issue in a very direct way.'

'The discovery of the body also examines the nature of what we perceive to be male, macho, movie behavior. If that body was discovered by, let's say the mainstream conventional film, it wouldn't have played out like that. The body would have been discovered and the hero's function in cinema is to impose order on disorder. To take a chaotic situation and say here's what we do.'

Indeed, this moody low-budget ensemble piece is in no way a conventional film and its many characters act and talk like real humans, not infallible superheroes with all the answers. 'I made a decision when finding that body to become the opposite of what I would imagine a conventional hero would do. I for example do not know how I would react if I came across the dead body of a raped girl in a river. I decided that I would make it as un-heroic as I possibly could. That's why the guy is terrified to touch the body.'

A consummate professional, Byrne took the events depicted in the film and compared them with reality. 'I had long conversations with Ray [Lawrence, the director] about what the nature of heroism is,' he pauses before switching to a real life tragedy. 'Let's say for example what happened on 9/11. It was an ordinary day, summer's day. Within an hour, people had turned into heroes and cowards,' Byrne's eyes glazing over as he stares into the distance. 'There were people who ran' you can't blame them for it. And there were people who were impelled by some primitive thing inside of them to be heroic.'

Despite being shot entirely in Australia with a predominantly Australian cast and crew, Byrne believes the film speaks to an international audience, particularly in the United States. '[It's] not just a film that takes place in a small town in Australia. It really deals with a lot of issues that we face here in America. I believe, living in New York, which is a city I've lived in for a quite a few years' which I've never really ' to be absolutely honest ' loved as a city. I live here but I don't love it. I think that everybody has a town they love and a town they belong to. New York doesn't happen to be that town for me but I have children here. There's a pall, an invisible fear that hangs over this city. We all' we don't talk about it very much' but it's there. Because we know that the ordered world that we had believed in up until 9/11 is now a distant myth. It's no longer that kind of world. Any moment, anything could happen.'

Turning back to the film's tragedy of the rape and murder of a young girl, Byrne offers with solemnity, 'This film begins in a landscape of utter calm, tranquil beauty and behind a rock is chaos waiting to happen. Despite all the rituals and all the forgiveness and all the hurt and all the damage, that's how the film ends. The same place, waiting to do the same thing again. The reason I think the film is unsettling is because it presents a world that we all know, whether we can articulate that on a regular basis or not, we live in a tremendously unpredictable and chaotic world. Where we do not know when the next awful thing is going to happen.'

His gaze becomes distant again as he turns to current events. 'Three days ago' who could have predicted that'' Byrne asks rhetorically with lingering intonations of shock. 'It's happened before but who could have predicted that that guy who lives down the corridor is a guy who kills thirty-three people because he's enraged. Well, that's the guy waiting behind the rock. There's a beautiful moment in the film where the mother tries to comfort the child and she says to him 'Don't worry it will be alright.' And at seven years of age, the child turns to the wall and says, 'Crap.' You realize that whether we like it or not, our children have absorbed, into their bones, they've absorbed our fears and absorbed our cynicism' Children understand they live in a violent world,' he laments.

Barely stopping to take a breath, Byrne goes on to tell a story about how his life was changed by the experience of working on Jindabyne. 'I tell the story simply because it is true,' he prefaces. 'I'd never seen a dead body before. When my Mother died, my Father died, my Sister died and friends of mine had died I went to the mortuary and I looked at the floor, I looked at the ceiling, I looked around, I looked at everything, I looked at the chamber sheet in front of me but I did not look at the body. Part of me was kind of ashamed of that because people are told 'you have to look at the body. You can't be going into a Church and not looking at the body.' I wanted to remember those people that I had been close to as I remembered them in life. I didn't want to go to bed every night as an adult man thinking of a face done up by an embalmer to look like something that was going to haunt me. I felt that I would be haunted if I looked at that,' stressing the word haunted with conviction.

'Three months after I came back from Australia having done this scene with this body that they'd spent four and a half months researching, photographing' and those guys came up with this prosthetic body that when you touched it weighed exactly and felt exactly as a real body because they had gotten it down that kind of detail. Three months after I came back from doing the film, a friend of mine, not a really close friend but someone I had worked with, died. The husband called me up and he said 'Listen, it would mean so much to the family if you came over to the mortuary house in Queens where the body is laid out.'

Despite initial pangs of dread, Byrne mustered up the courage to go to the mortuary and face his fears once and for all. 'I said to myself, 'I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna look at her face and see what it is, why it's important to look at the face.' So I crossed the room, I didn't allow that moment of logic and practicality and consequence to get in the way, I just said I'm gonna do it. I walked over and looked into the coffin and I looked at her face,' he pauses with reflection. 'I mean just stared at it. I came back down in my pew and I started to cry. Really cry. The husband came over and put his arm around me and said you know 'she really liked you and was really fond of you.''

'I walked out the door and got in the cab and I said to myself, 'What was all that about' What was that about'' And then I realized it taught me one of the most profound lessons of my life that what death is ' trite and all as it may sound ' is the stunning absence of life. And that's what death is,' he repeats quietly to himself. 'Suddenly life started to make sense to me. In eastern religions they have this thing where you cannot truly live your life unless you truly embrace death' and that is the truth.'

In this world of $20 million-plus paychecks and endless commercial tie-ins, it's becoming rarer and rarer to find actors who truly and genuinely commit to their craft. If there is one thing that is evident from hearing Gabriel Byrne talk, it's that he truly respects his profession.

He recalls telephoning the director and professing his newfound outlook on life. 'I called Ray and said 'I've gone through a lot working on this film, and maybe ten people will see it,'' he adds wryly, ''but it has made such a profound difference on my life that I can't ever thank you enough for giving me the opportunity to do the film. Now, the way I look at it is that every kind of film I do, I say 'I'm gonna learn something from this.' [I'll] work on something that will make me look at my life and figure out who I am' That's when I realized, maybe that's what it's all about.'