Gavin Cooney

THE NATIONAL PASTIME of talking about Saipan has now evolved into talking about Saipan.

The general reviews from film critics have been reasonably warm while, not unsurprisingly, the reception from those who were on the ground at the time has been decidedly cooler. 

Mick McCarthy is said to be “pretty pissed off” about his portrayal in the movie, while Kevin Kilbane used his Irish Times column to correct a few falsehoods, setting the record straight with the deathless assertion, “We were not pissheads”. 

And certainly the movie wildly overstates the extent to which Keane’s Irish team-mates drowned themselves in booze, which is only one of many inaccuracies, exaggerations and conflations. 

The crescendo hotel row with McCarthy after the publication of the offending Irish Times interview, for instance, did not include Keane railing against McCarthy’s being born in England, as the movie claims. Plus, the Irish Times didn’t shaft Keane by running the interview earlier than planned: sure, they brought it forward, but only by a few days and with Keane’s imprimatur. 

There are other, minor conflations. Keane’s objections to the FAI’s cheese sandwiches, for instance, came months earlier, which was obvious given the fact Keane was one of the primary reasons why Jimmy Floyd-Hasselbaink wasn’t at the World Cup. 

While Éanna Hardwicke’s central performance as Roy is outstanding, Steve Coogan’s depiction of Mick is disappointingly one-note, playing him as a lugubrious and slightly shambling uncle, missing his animating streak of ruthlessness which is obvious to any journalist who ever committed the sin of asking McCarthy about Saipan. Keane’s team-mates are almost entirely flattened out, too, with Kilbane condemning the impression of Niall Quinn as a “hapless idiot”. 

And even to embittered FAI watchers like this column, the composite FAI executive is a bit much, given he seems to have been designed according to Dylan Moran’s definition of an Irishman in the eyes of the English: someone who’ll offer to paint your house but might then rob your ladder. 

Though the movie makes tremendous use of a rich media archive of Liveline hysteria and British bemusement, as a realistic depiction of events on the island, Saipan is a flop.

But the movie is not supposed to be a fully accurate retelling of events because, well, what would be the point of that? 

If you instead interpret it as a piece of historical fiction from Keane’s perspective, then the above decisions are explicable. McCarthy is a deeper person than he is portrayed, but Keane refused to give him that depth. If he did, it would have been much more difficult to have fallen out with him in the first place. 

Keane’s team-mates’ drinking scenes are also shot as a series of hazy, dream-like scenes, giving them an air of unreality to the point you wonder, did these really happen at all? Or are they merely Keane’s imaginings or projections? 

Which in turn sets you to wonder: was the demonic asceticism which Keane couldn’t satisfy in Saipan a response to something without, or something within? 

The long, lingering silences and sheer awkwardness of the earlier Keane/McCarthy scenes meanwhile pose a fundamental question: why can’t these two Irishmen simply communicate with each other? And what manner of nonsense could have been prevented by the pair simply talking earnestly to each other? 

You may feel this is a too-generous reading of things, but the purpose of fictionalised retellings of factual events is not to provide answers, but to provoke questions.

There’s a difference between truth and verisimilitude. Journalism concerns itself with the latter, establishing the facts as to what happened. Art has to deal with the former, and so has to go articulate why something happened. 

Doing so in a 90-minute movie means taking liberties with the facts, which is always a more controversial undertaking when all the characters and subjects are all still alive and well-known. The Damned United suffered from the same problem, memorably derided by John Giles as “arty-farty nonsense”. 

Historical fiction works best behind a long, long lens: think I, Claudius by Robert Graves or Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. (Come to think of it, Thomas Cromwell would have made a fine FAI board member in the years after Saipan.) 

There was a collective rolling of eyes at the announcement that a Saipan movie was in the works. All these years on, did we really need yet another excavation of Roy vs Mick? 

As it turns out, the problem with Saipan is it’s still too soon to wrap our heads around it.