'The Commitments' turns 25
by Luke Taylor
August 17, 2016
Based on Roddy Doyle's novel of the same name, the film The Commitments tells the story of an ambitious group of young people living in the hardscrabble north end of Dublin who pull together to form a soul band. Alan Parker directed the film, which drew its cast largely from people in Dublin. Alongside established actors like Colm Meaney were fresh faces who are now well-known in the music world, notably Glen Hansard and Andrea Corr.
"I've always really enjoyed the film," says The Current's Bill DeVille. "When it came out, I didn't really know that much about soul music — I knew Wilson Pickett from 'In the Midnight Hour' — but yeah, it was a nice introduction to a lot of classic Stax, Volt and other old soul songs."
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the film's release. On Aug. 14, 1991, The Commitments debuted in select cities in the United States. General release dates in the U.S. and the U.K. followed just weeks later, and its release in Ireland came on Oct. 4, 1991.
"It was absolutely captivating," says Kieran Folliard. "It was hugely well received in Ireland."
Folliard, who describes himself as "an Irish guy who feels very fortunate to have landed in Minnesota and still be here after 29 years," is known for his work with 2Gingers Whiskey and FoodBuilding.com, work that was preceded by a lengthy and successful career in hospitality. When he moved to Minnesota in 1987, Folliard recalls discovering Doyle's book. "That was the year that the first of the Roddy Doyle trilogies — the Barrytown trilogies — came out, and The Commitments was the first one," he says. "I remember reading it back when I came here; I suppose part of it was the nostalgia of wanting to hold onto Ireland."
When the film was released four years later, Folliard said he saw it almost immediately. "For myself, I thought it really brought to life what it was like to be living in parts of Dublin in 1987," he says. "The characters, the dialogue — the realism of the dialogue with the characters. Nothing was airbrushed. It was fantastic."
Folliard was born and raised in a small rural community in County Mayo, in the west of Ireland, but he moved to the Northside of Dublin in the early 1980s for work, living in the very area in which the Commitments is set. "It was also an area where Roddy Doyle himself had been a teacher for many years," Folliard says, "and so he had lived the experiences of the people he was writing about in North County, Dublin. It was high unemployment, drug use, very challenging, but very down-to-earth, raw, real characters."
That earthiness is expressed in the music of the Commitments, who embrace soul music as their genre of choice. Among the working-class people of Ireland as well as in the U.K., soul music had enjoyed a great deal of popularity. Folliard believes the Irish working-class felt a kinship with the African-American experience and music, making it the logical choice of a band like the Commitments.
Glen Hansard — who would go on to success with his band, the Frames; on the film Once; and as a solo singer-songwriter — had some artistic differences with Parker during the making of the film and "hated" the experience, as he told The Independent. That said, in a 2007 interview at The Current with Mary Lucia (see video below), Hansard describes his fondness for the script. "Once I read a few lines, I realized how much I loved Roddy Doyle's writing," he said.
Folliard suggests The Commitments may have instilled hope among Irish musicians and propelled some of them, like Hansard, to greater heights. "I'm sure that type of influence and then exposure would have created networks of connections that could be drawn on," Folliard posits, "but also I would say that it gave that sense of optimism and hope that, 'It can be done, we can stay in Ireland, we can create, there is an opportunity for our voice to be heard beyond the shores of Ireland,' and one success I guess to some degree leads to another: more and more people trying, and out of that comes more opportunities and more success."
Twenty-five years on, the long-term appeal of soul music continues. "I think it's probably, in a lot of ways, even stronger now than it's been since the heyday back in the mid- to late '60s," DeVille says. "There's the Sharon Jones documentary, Miss Sharon Jones, which is out now; I think it opens in the theaters here on August 25th or 26th. And if you look at The Current's playlist, at any given time there's probably 7 or 8 vintage-soul-sounding tunes that we're playing."
DeVille cites such artists as Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Charles Bradley, St. Paul and the Broken Bones, Mavis Staples, Mayer Hawthorne, Erykah Badu, D'Angelo, Raphael Saadiq, Anderson East, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, Leon Bridges, Michael Kiwanuka, and Sonny Knight and the Lakers. "We've always gotten a huge response to that stuff, and those shows are always well attended," DeVille says.
As for the legacy of The Commitments, Folliard believes there's a theme that extends beyond music. "I would say the everlasting moral for me is the opportunity to express your talent and to get recognition for it and to get whatever 'success' means to you out of it, you have to put the band together, whatever your 'band' is in life," he says. "You have to put it together and you have to say 'Go' and start. And so that is something that I think translates very well, not just to the artistic world, but to community world, to business world, et cetera. Just start. The possibility, the hope, is always there."
