They're heroes of many a well-fought bottle, and they are not going gently into the dark night of Tom Collins' "Kings."This wrenching tragedy features five live Irishmen and one dead one. Thirty years earlier, they were a medal-winning sailing team, setting out in high spirits from Conamara for London -- one for all, all for one! -- to find work. The plan was to return.It usually is ...Now, one of their lot, Jackie, has died in a tube-train accident. His wake will reunite the others and reawaken their issues:Gentle Git (Brendan Conroy) tries to keep volatile mate Jap (Donal O'Kelly) under control -- both his anger and his drinking -- in the shabby flat they share. This ne'er-do-well duo is always broke, cadging drinks, pawning watches, forever idealizing Ireland through an alcoholic haze. The wreath they bring to Jackie's funeral? Filched from a cemetery along the way.Mairtin (Barry Barnes), by contrast, is a married man trying hard to stay on the wagon -- no thanks to the tauntings and temptations all around.Joe (Colm Meaney), who owns a construction business, is the sole financial success of the lot. He had hired and then fired Jackie for -- what else? -- drinking. Guilt-ridden Joe snorts coke, "the rich man's drink."All of them had the same basic choice to make when they came to London: maintain their old identities or adapt. On this solemn occasion of Jackie's wake, the fatal combo of booze and nostalgia produces jealousy and bitterness, the taking and switching of sides -- "one for all" no more.Billed as the first Irish-produced bilingual film, "Kings" is mostly spoken in subtitled Irish (Gaeilge) and has a theatrical feel owing to its stage genesis from Jimmy Murphy's play, "Kings of Kilburn High Road."If that's a drawback, it is offset by a brilliant ensemble quintet of actors who bring it to film life. Conroy is the best, with the rheumiest old eyes since Buster Keaton. You've never seen a more sorrowful volume written on one face. He and O'Kelly, in their symbiotic denial, are almost like Tennessee Williams characters, clinging to each other for survival.Sean O'Tarpaigh turns in a moving supporting performance as Jackie's shell-shocked old dad, come to London to fetch the body back to Ireland, staring incredulously at his son's skinny wood coffin.Collins directs the limited action as vigorously as he can. Those fab singing nuns at Jackie's funeral are the Irish equivalent of Lila Kedrova's character's paid mourners in "Zorba the Greek."But what most occupies us, and the film, are the increasingly rowdy, revelatory bar scenes, full of roaring recriminations and drunken "Danny Boy" renditions (but also some truly exquisite instrumental music)."We coulda been kings " is the lament, and this Book of Lamentations makes the biblical one look jocular. But the telling of the tale is painfully beautiful.Such relentless, drunken regret fills the souls of these deposed "Kings."Rating: Unrated, but R in nature for pervasive language. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette film critic Barry Paris can be reached at parispg48(at)aol.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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