Breakfast on Pluto: Movie & DVD Review (2006)

(Originally published 2006)

The new Neil Jordan movie, "Breakfast on Pluto," isn't a comedy, though comedy certainly runs through it. It isn't a mystery or a thriller, though those elements come into play. It isn't a romance, though God knows there are times when the film practically overflows with it. And it isn't a road movie, though the main character, Patrick "Kitten" Braden (Cillian Murphy), a transvestite with legs up to here and lashes out to there, has more adventures on the road than most could endure. Or even fathom.

So what is this movie, a good deal of which is set in Ireland and folds into its plot the bombings and bloodshed of the IRA? How do you peg it, especially when it also features two computer-generated birds at the beginning and end whose insights into the characters and their situations are put into subtitles?

The quick answer is that you can't peg it. "Breakfast on Pluto" truly is of its own universe. Its own rules drive it. There is no defining it, so you just go with it.

Adapted by Jordan ("The Crying Game," "Interview with the Vampire") from Pat McCabe's novel, the film is as free-wheeling as the times, particularly when Kitten (whose name is a wee bit more salacious in the book) comes into his own just as the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960s and '70s is gathering thrust.

Though he'd be the first to disagree, on one level Kitten is one lucky cat. In this new mod world where anything goes, his uniqueness is given a measure elbow room, even in his tiny Irish hamlet of Tyreelin, where he was left at the doorstep of a priest (Liam Neeson) as an infant and eventually raised by a family who couldn't understand his desire to wear gold lame. Go figure.

Aware of their quiet (and sometimes not-so-quiet) disagreement of his lifestyle, Kitten decides enough is enough and hits the road, where he hopes to find his birth mother, a woman he has been told looks like the actress Mitzi Gaynor.

His life as a drifter begins when he thumbs a ride out of town. There, he meets up with a band called "The Mohawks," in which the lead singer, Billy Hatchet (Cagin Friday), falls hard for him. Their relationship is the launching pad for a life of casual abandon. Since Kitten doesn't care whether he lives or dies, he allows himself a reckless sort of freedom in which homelessness is part of the equation, but then so are stints in which he works as Stephen Rea's magician's assistant and as the talent at a peep show.

Without failure, Kitten always is rescued--he has that affect on people, who tend to want to help him. What affect this has on the movie is that it robs of any sense of urgency surrounding Kitten's condition. Since there rarely is any question that he won't survive even the most brutal of situations--and there are a few of them here--the movie lacks the dramatic weight it could have had had Kitten not been quite so invincible.

As played by Murphy in what is an excellent, absorbing performance, he's sort of like a transvestite superhero--able to overcome impossible situations and look fabulous while doing it.

Grade: B