THE VAN (55)

Directed by: Stephen Frears

Starring: Colm Meaney, Donal O'Kelly, Neili Conroy

The Pitch: During the 1990 World Cup two unemployed Dubliners decide to set up a fast-food business, serving food out the back of a van.

Theo Sez: Under-rated, though you can see why - it's too long for a start, and the tone is sour and prickly, not terribly attractive. Unlike THE COMMITMENTS and THE SNAPPER (the first two adaptations of Roddy Doyle's "Barrytown Trilogy"), which often seemed like amusement rides at the Ireland Theme Park - boisterous, upbeat and carefully structured - this lets the story wander and pushes into less charming, more bad-tempered territory, at the same time pushing past the stereotype of the rowdy Guinness-loving Irishman to reflect the centuries of ugly strife that actually forged the national psyche (and perhaps also to offer a riposte to the working-class solidarity of Frears' THE SNAPPER, to make it clear that a housing estate in a poor Dublin suburb is not, in fact, a particularly happy place). The change is most marked, and most brave, in the stock character played by Meaney, the only actor to have starred in all three Doyle adaptations - his easy-going paterfamilias a highlight of both the earlier movies, a shambling bear forever bewildered by family crises but always ready for a trip down the pub when things got too hairy. Here, for the first time, the character is more pathetic than cuddly, his foolishness finally wrecking the business ("I'm so useless," he whimpers pitifully). It gives a new, probably more honest spin to Doyle's constant theme, the way families work (a passing reference to "The Waltons" is by no means accidental) : at the very end, when this great buffoon asks his long-suffering wife to give him a hug, you're not sure if you want her to comfort him or let him suffer ; which, in my book, is probably a good thing. The black sheep of the trilogy, the least successful but perhaps the most interesting.