Lifestyle

GARAGE

TRAGI-COMEDY SET IN RURAL IRISH PETROL STATION

The discreet scent of a dying west-Ireland community pervades Lenny Abrahamson’s Garage. Gentle misfit Josie, played by Pat Shortt, lives out his life in the garage of the title watching the world passing by him, snatching brief cordialities with locals who share a benign lack of interest in Josie’s limited world. Largely isolated from the small town and naïve of the exploitation visited upon him by Mr. Gallacher, the owner of the garage, Josie quite literally bumbles along from one day to the next. There are small hints towards the possibility of an autism spectrum disorder, though never confirmed, which may explain his difficulty in reaching out to the people around him.

Abrahamson describes the style he intended as “slapstick tragedy”, with good reason. Some moments are reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy in the very physical humour, which is enough to genuinely make you belly laugh. Josie’s discomfort in social situations never grates and elicits sympathy for his attempts to connect to the unhappy, pessimistic and at times cynical residents of a town forgotten by a resurgent Celtic Tiger economy.

His growing friendship with a local teenager who begins working with him holds out new possibilities for the tamely optimistic Josie. The slowly growing sense of hope amid bleak lives leads him to try to reach others around him, though all this is suddenly shut off from him with one wrong, to him seemingly banal, decision.

There are instances where Garage begins to feel like the work of an Irish Shane Meadows, though this is certainly not a criticism. Dark suggestions of a cold disregard for the fate of living creatures are tempered by a growing bond with a horse, trapped in a very narrow strip of grass. The metaphors in this need not be explained as the film goes on, never explicit and sensitively handled leading to a superb close.

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