At first glance, the new Irish romantic comedy, The
Matchmaker, might not be an obvious choice for the film's Aussie
director, Mark Joffe. The man responsible for such underrated
gems as Grievous Bodily Harm, The Great Bookie Robbery, the
affectionate Spotswood, as well as his widely praised film
version of Cosi, is very picky about what he does. While devoting
many years to writing his own script, he put it aside when The
Matchmaker came along. "I'm very attracted to that kind of
genre", the Russian-born Joffe explains. "And let's
face it, the tougher films I did early on hadn't travelled as
well as the lighter films, so you tend to get these sort of
scripts." The Matchmaker "kinda came from out of the
blue" and Joffe would only agree to do it if the script was
changed from the original. "When I first read it, let's face
it, it was pretty fucking crappy, which is why I'm proud of the
film: you wouldn't notice the problems we'd had from the
outset."
"When we met her, I
really liked her spontaneity and everything about her."
In The Matchmaker, American comedienne Janeane Garofalo plays
Marcy Tizard, a second-tier worker for the re-election campaign
of Massachusetts senator John McGlory (Jay O. Sanders). Trailing
badly in the polls, McGlory and his campaign manager Nick Ward
(Denis Leary) come up with a desperate plan to win over the
State's Irish vote: McGlory will visit his actual kin in Ireland.
The job of finding those kin is left to Marcy, who is sent to the
small coastal town of Ballinagra to dig up McGlory's roots.
Little does she know that she'll be landing in the middle of the
town's annual match-making festival, or that the town's leading
matchmaker (Milo O'Shea) has his eye on fixing up Marcy with an
enigmatic local fellow, Sean (David O'Hara).
Commenting on the major differences between the initial script
he was given and the final draft, Joffe explains that the first
version "had an awful amount of exposition in it, the kind
of stuff the Americans love. For instance, Garofalo's character
might say 'I want to do this'; talk about herself like a lot of
American movies go on about. There was a lot of predictable, real
sort of cornball stuff, that I just couldn't abide, and I don't
want to go into. So I said I'd be interested in making this
movie, if we went in a different direction, and made it a lot
more modern - groovier - and try and subvert the genre a little
bit without affecting the expectations of the audience too
much." Part of that subversion was the casting of funny girl
Garofalo in the role of leading lady, the anti-romantic heroine,
defying convention. "When we met her, I really liked her
spontaneity and everything about her. As it turned out, she was
not only wonderful, as you can see in the film, but she was also
great on a professional level. In some ways, she was a lot like
the character, in that she arrived in Ireland, asking herself:
where the hell have I landed? She doesn't travel too much. Then
after a little while she just loves it and she still talks about
it."
"The greatest
compliment I've had so far, is that it feels like the film is
not directed by an American."
Joffe was aware that in making another film with American
characters placed in Ireland, there was a danger in resorting to
caricature and stereotype, a fact which some American critics
pointed out. "The greatest compliment I've had so far, is
that it feels like the film is not directed by an American. As
far as I'm concerned, there's nothing worse than being
patronising or condescending to a culture, and not being OF that
culture, especially using a bit of irony in exploring a cliché.
A few of the American film trade critics accused me of portraying
the Irish in a very clicheed way, but they missed the whole
ironic tone of the film; they're such dickheads. They really
didn't have a clue, because we had it re-written by the two lads
who wrote the TV series Father Ted, who are both Irish. And they
gave it a real, ironic, Irish feel."
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