Divorcing Jack
110 minutes, Certificate 15. Mosaic Movies 1998.
VHS 
DVD
Director
David Caffrey. Starring Robert Lindsay, David Thewlis, Laura
Fraser, Rachel Griffiths and Jason Isaacs.
Most of the recent films set in Ulster – Some Mother’s Son springs to mind – have been thinly disguised republican propaganda. Not so Divorcing Jack. It’s based on Colin Bateman’s bestselling first novel, which appeared some years ago. It was actually filmed in Belfast. Naturally, as Bateman was once the editor of the Bangor Spectator, some of the action was shot in the Co Down town.
Set in an independent Ulster state in 1999, Thewlis plays a cynical journalist who has to cover the election campaign of Michael Brinn, a slick politician (played by Robert Lindsay) in the company of a Black American journalist from the Boston Globe. Dan Starkey, Thewlis’s character, is the hard-drinking pary-loving kind and this gets him into trouble. He invites Margaret, an art student he meets in the Botanic Gardens, to a party. A misunderstanding leads to him being thrown out by his angry wife, Patricia.
The student, a former girlfriend of a notorious IRA man, invites him back to her place, a fancy warehouse loft where she can practise her art. Obviously her father is quite well off. When Starkey returns from a pizza-buying errand, he finds that Margaret has become the victim of a brutal murder.
He panics and runs, covered in Margaret’s blood. On the run, helped by an unlikely nun, everyone from the police, the IRA and the UVF are on his tail. Why? It’s something to do with Margaret’s last words, ‘Divorcing Jack’. What does this mean? Starkey has to find the answer before some of his pursuers catch up with him. It involves the past of the slick and polished Michael Brinn. You won’t rest in your seats at the twists and turns of this superb and hilarious thriller. Belfast folk will also enjoy trying to work out where various scenes were shot. You must see this film!
David Kerr
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