When not turning up in moneyspinning TV shows like The Wire or Game of Thrones, or the Maze Runner franchise or in smallish roles in big-money movies like Bohemian Rhapsody the actor Aidan Gillen can often be found in small-scale features, often as their anchor.
Barber doesn’t quite fit into the same category as The Good Man, Mister John, Still or Rose Plays Julie (crackers all, marked out by brilliantly intense Gillen performances). But it is enjoyable, a wee Irish movie made for a small budget which seems to have all the hallmarks of the tryout pilot for a possible TV series.
By which I mean more characters than strictly necessary for the functioning of the plot, which is The Big Sleep set in Dublin, with Gillen as a dog-eared detective trying to white-knight his way towards finding a missing young woman.
An old-school shamus brought up to date in a “woke Ireland” that’s all about gay rights, the MeToo moment and Covid – masks feature prominently – with Gillen as Valentine Barber, the troubled detective whose missing person case leads him up murky alleys towards people who believe their elevated social position makes them untouchable.
It is explicitly a modern noir, set on the backstreets and in night-time bars where downbeat characters trade information for drinks. The word “gumshoe” is used. At one point in his investigation Gillen’s Barber meets a woman called Lexie Finnegan (Camille O’Sullivan) who is not only dressed in 1940s clothes but utters a snatch of The Big Sleep – the “I like to see them work out a little first” line that Bacall used to play footsie with Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe.
Co-writers Fintan Connolly and Fiona Bergin are having a little joke with all this noir stuff, sometimes against the character of Barber himself. His “demons”, for example, amount to little more than a smoking habit he’s trying to kick. Nicotine patches feature.
There are other boxes to be ticked and they are. Barber has a marriage (failed) and a daughter (semi-estranged). He has ex-colleagues (who mostly hate his guts). He usually does private investigations for husbands trying to catch their wives playing away. He’s a gloomy guy with a seen-it-all face, and an office with a striking personal assistant (Irma Mali) who seems at every appearance about to become something more signficant in the story.
So does the wife (Helen Behan). So does the daughter (Aisling Kearns). So does the former colleague who is now tormenting him (Liam Carney), for reasons that are at least 50 per cent personal as well as professional.
For a standalone movie many of the characters in Barber seem to be surplus to requirements. But as the beginning of a run of possibly feature-length crime dramas they make a lot more sense. I can imagine, for instance, the techy guy at the backstreet phone shop, called simply Tecky in the credits and played by Aaron Edo, getting beefed up in future installments, to take him beyond selling burner phones and cracking passcodes. If there were to be any.
Running through it all is a theme of loyalty – to your spouse, your boyfriend, your vocation, your family and yourself. But also, more problematically, the problem of loyalty when it comes up against the notion of justice. Cops protecting each other when they’re bent. Politicians getting away with crimes because the establishment has their back.
It’s a laid back drama, deliberately so, and occasionally it lays back a little too far and gets a bit too languid for its own good. The Dublin settings add a refreshing sense of the unfamiliar – it’s moody enough for film noir, easily – and Gillen keeps the whole thing moving along with a performance that’s free-flowing and natural, like an Irish-born Jim Rockford.
Looking at the IMDb, there don’t seem to be any more Barber stories in the works. Maybe it wasn’t a tryout at all, maybe I just misread it. Pity. I’d watch.
Barber – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
