The Commitments (1991)

The Commitments arrives from 1991, directed by Alan Parker from Roddy Doyle's novel, and concerns a young Dublin man named Jimmy Rabbitte who assembles a soul band out of his Northside neighbors. The men are unemployed and the women are the backing vocalists, and the film regards both conditions without editorializing. Poverty here is texture, not thesis. The band rehearses above a snooker hall, acquires its equipment from a black marketeer, and disintegrates with the same casual inevitability with which it came together. Nobody at any point explains to the audience what any of it means.

The film's engagement with African-American soul music deserves a moment of scrutiny, since that is the sort of material that might invite commentary in a later era. It does not. The Commitments treat Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding as repertoire and vocation, a working-class Irish inheritance, and the film never converts that affection into a lesson about race or appropriation. The three female singers are given personalities, jokes, and romantic entanglements, then absorbed back into the story of the men. No critique of that arrangement is offered, and none is requested. The only sermonizing in the picture concerns heroin, and it is a lie Jimmy tells a priest to secure a gig.

What we have, then, is a musical comedy-drama with real craft and almost no contemporary social programming. The environment goes unmentioned. Nobody is diagnosed. The wealthy are not eaten. The film's political content extends to a passing contempt for record executives and a general sense that life is disappointing. It took four BAFTAs and an Academy Award nomination for editing, and it has aged into a document of a vanished mode of filmmaking: interested in people, music, and the comedy of disappointment, with no interest whatsoever in instructing its audience. The Commitments sits near the floor of our scale, and does so with a clear conscience.