The Chaos of Life, Irish-Style

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

We all make mistakes. But Sharon Curley's (Tina Kellegher) is a beaut. It's not just that in a careless, definitely not rapturous, moment she manages to get knocked up. It's that the man who bent her back over the hood of a car outside a pub one drunken night is old enough to be her father. Is, indeed, a friend of her father's. Is, in fact, George Burgess (Pat Laffan), who lives across the street and coaches the football team of one of her younger brothers. Is, incurably, an "ejit" (idiot in Dublin slang), the kind of old fool who mutters "A1" after having his way with Sharon and then boasts around the pub about what a good "ride" she is.

This, you ask, is the stuff of comedy? No, not exactly. It is the pretext for comedy -- wonderful comedy, maybe the best of the year. For The Snapper (the word is local dialect for a baby) isn't really about making mistakes. It's about how, as Sharon comes to term, the Curley family all come to terms with what she's done, with themselves and with the little gossiping corner of the world they inhabit.

You may have met the Curleys before. Under another name they are the central figures of novelist Roddy Doyle's Barrytown trilogy about working-class Irish folk, from which Doyle also adapted The Commitments for the screen. He's a writer who likes to pack lots of lively characters, talk and unpremeditated activity into relatively tight spaces, thereby creating the kind of lifelike untidiness, fractiousness and believable goofiness that American movie comedy, with its stress on easily summarizable concepts and subteen gag writing, can only dream about.

The Curleys, for example, are a family of eight, all crammed into a tiny house. Here there's no room for anything but straight shooting, whether the subject is sex, using the bathroom or what's playing on the telly. The mother, Kay (Ruth McCabe), is patient, taciturn and sweet. When the question of contraception arises, she recalls the best she ever knew: the gift of a coat from her husband Dessie (Colm Meaney), which prevented him from taking her out in the fields where it might get dirty.

The father is more volatile. When Sharon claims she can't remember her seducer's name because she was drunk, he snaps, "I was drunk when I met your mother, and I remember her name." But he's essentially a tolerant, loving man, and it's the growth of his consciousness that provides the movie's connective tissue. At first acceptant of Sharon's news, he angers when he discovers who the father is. But when Sharon tries to provide a saving lie -- he was really a sailor off a Spanish ship -- it doesn't sit well with him. In the end, he knows he can live happily only with the truth. He buys a book about sex and pregnancy (from which he learns a few techniques himself), and when it's time to drive Sharon to the hospital, he bawls the old Rawhide theme song, "Rollin', rollin', rollin'. "

Meaney's performance takes the character from traditional maleness to New Man-ishness in a wry, naturalistic, utterly convincing way. But then, all the acting in Stephen Frears' film is of that caliber. The director is at his best when jumbling moods and mixing motives, yet keeping everything straight and true. He neither patronizes nor celebrates these lives. He just makes them real. And in the process makes us their loving, laughing, admiring intimates.