“Death of a Ladies’ Man” Review!

Director: Matt Bissonnette

Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Jessica Pare, Brian Gleeson

Director Matt Bissonnette’s Gabriel Byrne-starrer “Death of a Lady’s Man” is a mellow, forgettable drama that Byrne or the audience can offer, outside of the Leonard Cohen songs. Byrne plays Samuel O’Shea, a 60-year-old Irish writer and old-school artist living in Montreal who teaches poetry to university students, pursues young women and drinks a lot of whiskey. After the breakup of his second marriage, Samuel is thrown into a crisis that leads him to strange and wonderful hallucinations after the discovery of a terminal brain tumor.

Like Cohen’s music, it is in this paranoia that “Death of a Woman Man” tries to make its own mark. When director Matt combines the visions with Cohen’s songs, it makes for some fun, the highlight of which is the ice skating ballet set to “Bird on the Wire,” the film’s most genuinely moving moment. Often, however, these diversions are so self-consciously empty that they are welcomed to the point of annoyance.

As his health worsens and he returns to Ireland for peace, Samuel finds himself visited by the spirit of his father, Ben (Brian Gleeson), who died in his youth. Director Matt presents these visitations in a different way to other hallucinations, and the wisdom that Ben offers may be that his presence is “real,” allowing for a deeper honesty than you get anywhere else in the film.

Byrne and Gleeson make easy chemistry and decent company, and you want their relationship to last longer than the film’s runtime, unbound by the conventions of linear time and barriers between life and death. Instead, it’s constantly interrupted by sub-plots involving Samuel’s children and ex-wife, which strain credibility while testing your patience – not helped by weak performances from the supporting cast. Contrasted with the natural beauty and beautiful unpolluted night skies of rural Ireland, it’s all the more poignant as the return home of the living is in dreary gray cityscapes.

The film has a lot of ideas that kick each other, and only a few of them are good. Sure, Byrne is a believable leading man for a light drama like this, but he doesn’t have much to do, and so many poorly acted films around him make for a truly comical ending.