PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 11/18/05)

After you’ve made the film featuring the most famous that’s-a-man-baby reveal in cinematic history, revisiting the transgender world will look to some cynics like a lazy bid for a notoriety/box office encore.

Breakfast on Pluto, adapted by Crying Game director Neil Jordan from a 1998 novel by Patrick McCabe (whose The Butcher Boy Jordan filmed to great effect in ’98) is not that thing. This exuberant, bounding, moving film is explicitly about its gender-bending character—Patrick “Kitten” Braden, played with unstoppable wit and feeling by Cillian Murphy—in a way that Game was not about Dil. (And even more than Game, Pluto impeccably depicts the insouciance-as-defense-mechanism mode that’s such a mainstay of drag existence.) That’s one thing. Another is Pluto’s picaresque mode, its way of contrasting Kitten’s flamboyance with the dark times Ireland faced in the ’70s while maintaining a Candide-like bounce in its storytelling. Jordan and McCabe draw up a wildly eclectic slate of characters and depict just about each and every one of them in the full messy flowering of their humanity—that Jordan’s got actors like Liam Neeson, Ian Hart, Stephen Rea, and Brendan Gleeson on board doesn’t hurt. (Kudos are also due for Jordan’s casting of Bryan Ferry in a spectacular bit, and Ferry’s willingness to play up the nasty underside of his ’70s lounge lizard persona.) Playful, poetic, shocking, saddening, and ultimately gratifyingly and honestly big-hearted, Pluto is an apotheosis of sorts for Jordan.—Glenn Kenny