Life's A Breeze

After his acclaimed drama Kisses, writer-director Lance Daly took himself stateside to call the shots on the 2011 drama The Good Doctor, written by Veronica Mars scribe John Enborn and starring one Orlando Bloom. Sounds like a big deal, right? Oddly, it was never given a release in Ireland or the UK but the 64% rating on Rotten Tomatoes suggests maybe it should have. Daly returns home for this charming low key comedy-drama.

Daly plants us in the middle of the recession with three-day weeks, dole queues and adult children moving back home. Pat Shortt's Colm doesn't have to move home because he never left, the chancer living off eighty-year-old Nan (Flanagan), a hoarder. When Colm and the rest of his siblings - Birthistle, Lesley Conroy, Ger Carey - surprise Nan with a total refurbishment of her cramped house, she's aghast that her mattress was thrown out too. It's got her life savings in it, you see - something close to a million euro! Cue a panicked search around Dublin's dumps and recycling depots.

Like in his last feature (the last that was released here anyway), Daly enjoys taking the viewer around lesser spotted Dublin but where everything linked in Kisses, plot developments this time don't click as neatly as they should, while some subplots flit in and out of the story. One subplot makes proceedings worthwhile, however.

Pat Shortt might be the star of the piece - and his man-child is given all the comic moments - but the movie really belongs to Flanagan and the young Kelly Thornton, making an impressive debut. The two form a nice duo and Daly skilfully avoids the whole old mentor/young heroine story in a subplot that comes up with the film's best scenes. Sitting in the middle of a pile or rubbish, the grouchy Flanagan, whose deliberate delivery is out of step with the busy hubbub going on around her, puts aside her usual caustic jibes for a wonderful speech about her late husband. Later, Thornton wanders about a disused warehouse in a beautifully shot sequence that seems both part of the story and aloof from it. If only Daly could find excuses to get these two alone some more.

Likeable but Daly will write and direct better films.