The Miracle

After his big-time, American-made film (the painfully unfunny comedy We're No Angels) went bust, director Jordan returned to his Irish seaside hometown of Bray to regroup. The result is this film, The Miracle (which Jordan also wrote) -- a delightful, disarming, whimsical and classically dramatic story. With it, he returns to the narrative pitch and revisionist storytelling that he earlier displayed in films such as Mona Lisa and The Company of Wolves, as well as the playful fantasy that never quite succeeded in High Spirits. Jimmy (Byrne) and Rose (Pilkington) are two teenagers who spend their summer vacation in this Irish seaside resort watching the town's various inhabitants while making up stories about them. These teens are precocious and ultra-literary; everything is fodder for their romantic plot lines of unrequited love and fantasy relationships. They record their favorite descriptions in a journal. Their stage is the waterfront boardwalk with its endless stream of passing characters and changing backdrops of fish & chip joints, dance halls, funhouse mirrors and musical theater shows. And then...the circus comes to town. Also arriving in town is Renee (D'Angelo), a mystery woman with whom the much younger Jimmy is smitten. Their mutual cat and mouse game ultimately crescendos into a classicly perverse Oedipal love knot. Meanwhile, Rose, who's really smitten with her best companion Jimmy, occupies herself with “humanizing” the circus's rough and ready animal trainer. I'm afraid this description doesn't really do justice to the dream-like charm and picture-perfect integrity of The Miracle. Its blend of whimsy and realism is unusual and (most of the time) works. The teenagers are played by novice performers and they manage to get that adolescent anomie and adult-beyond-their-years expressiveness just right. And D'Angelo, as always, is a captivating pleasure to watch and second-guess. And the elephants... (remember the circus is in town). The Miracle may have one of the best uses of elephants in a film (take my word for it, I happen to be connoisseur of this specialty category). And what does it mean that D'Angelo is in not one, but two of my all-time favorite “best use of an elephant” movies? You tell me.