WhatzUp

Breakfast on Pluto
by Derek Neff

Patrick (Patricia) “Kitten” Braden - but you can just call him Kitten, dear - is a unique character to say the least: unapologetically effeminate, flamboyantly cross-dressing, politically oblivious and oddly innocent. Coming of age in politically turbulent 1970s Ireland, Kitten (played by Cillian Murphy of 28 Days Later and Red Eye) hits the road in search of his mother, who planted him on the doorstep of a Catholic rectory when he was a baby (every time I use a pronoun for Kitten, I find myself writing “her” and “she” and then backtracking to correct my error: Kitten really is more woman than man, and it’s a tribute to Murphy as an actor that he is able to convey this native femininity so well).

Kitten is highly adept at finding ostensibly straight men to protect and shelter her (I mean him) from the big bad world: a glam-rocker-cum-IRA-gun-runner (Gavin Friday); a sad-eyed magician (Stephen Rea); a gruff man who dresses up as a furry creature at a children’s park (played by fellow 28 Days Later alum Brendan Gleeson); even the two cops who beat Kitten up in an interrogation room after a terrorist bombing at a disco which they believe Kitten set off.

This is basically a quest movie. Kitten desperately wants to find his now-mythical mother at the same time that he seeks to transform himself into the person he most wants to be (that is, a woman). (While watching Breakfast on Pluto, I found myself vaguely thinking of Spielberg’s AI and, by extension, Pinocchio.)

I was also reminded of Forrest Gump. like Gump, Kitten is a much derided social outcast who always seems to find help in the unlikeliest places just when he needs it the most. Also like Gump, Kitten is a happy-go-lucky innocent who nevertheless often finds himself a central witness to historical turning points in his home country. (This is as much a movie about Ireland at a troubling point in its history as it is about Kitten.) Forrest Gump was bookended by the image of a feather flying through the air; in Breakfast, the feather becomes a pair of wise-cracking robins who flit about near the rectory where our story both begins and ends.

Director Neil Jordan (adapting from a novel by Patrick McCabe) nimbly moves Kitten from one situation to another by breaking up the action into very short (three to five minutes long) self-contained chapters, complete with often frivolous titles. This is a narrative conceit that in lesser hands could have been highly annoying, though Jordan (The Crying Game, Interview with a Vampire) has the chops to pull it off. I’d be lying if I said that I’ve thought about Breakfast on Pluto much since watching it, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t interesting and fun (and frequently quite funny) while it lasted.