Adam & Paul

Year: 2004

Actors: Michael McElhatton

Duration: 83 min

This movie follows a day in the life of 2 Dublin Heroin addicts, Adam and Paul. Adam is the taller and slightly smarter of the two while Paul is his sidekick. Since they were small boys, Adam and Paul have withered into two hopeless, desperate Dublin junkies, tied together by habit and necessity. A stylized, downbeat comedy, the film follows the pair through a single day, which, like every other, is entirely devoted to the business of scrounging and robbing money for drugs.The difference today is that Adam and Paul already near rock bottom have finally run out of luck, credit and friends.Stylistically, Adam & Paul is a cold, contemporary take on classic, physical comedy. Thematically, it is a minimal, Beckettesque fairytale about two baffled, vulnerable children in the grip of forces too powerful for them to handle; vulnerable, lost, sometimes pathetically optimistic, but always profoundly damaged. Adam & Paul is not a film without hope; it is a tender, unsentimental and very funny testament to the persistence of the human spirit in even the most damaged and marginal of people.Some of the sequences within the film have been beautifully captured, in particular a scene shot on the Millennium Bridge, which very aptly depicts the mood through its sluggish and dreamy chops between shots. The techniques, used wonderfully, portray one of the very rare moments in the film when Adam and Paul are oblivious to the inevitability of their fate, blissfully happy in their drug-induced state.So what of 'Adam and Paul'? Well, it is too funny to be depressing, too bleak to be great, yet deeply touching in its handling of the subject matter, and on that account worth watching.You'll never look at Dublin in the same light again.

Genre: Comedy   Drama