Flasz On Film

The official synopsis of Saipan, found on iMDb and Wikipedia, reads as follows: “On the eve of the 2002 FIFA World Cup, the Irish captain Roy Keane (Éanna Hardwicke) forfeits his place in the squad at the team’s preparation base in Saipan, following a heated disagreement with the Irish manager Mick McCarthy (Steve Coogan).” And you’d think to yourself that it’s a perfectly good synopsis. Nice, cogent and efficient. The only problem is that it essentially describes the entire film, leaving very little for you to discover when you sit down to watch it.

I sometimes ask myself—and you’re free to examine whatever comes out of it in your own time—whether an intrusive thought of mine can sustain an article and if I can string 800-1000 words together and plop them down on the page in support of it. And you know what? I sometimes bail and let those ideas wither on the vine. It’s OK. And I’d like to use this opportunity to reach out through the zeros and ones that add up to what the Internet is and tell the filmmakers who put Saipan together that not all stories need to be turned into movies. Maybe there isn’t enough flavour and value here to warrant a feature-length story, even if whatever preliminary idea that sparked this project suggested otherwise. As I said: it’s OK to bail. Especially when you find out after you start scratching the surface and digging deeper into this idea that there’s not much more in there after all.

But I equally understand the drive to finish what you started and that once Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn—the filmmaking duo behind this project who have previously made the wonderful Good Vibrations—got their funding in place and secured the backing of the team who produced Kneecap alongside a number of other funding bodies (the list of logos at the top of this movie is truly intimidating, to be perfectly honest), that there was no backing out. The production train was in motion. So… they did what they could.

Saipan is therefore a weird movie that honestly doesn’t have a reason to exist in the manner that it does, especially if you factor in the realization that the filmmakers did end up making artistic choices here, adding characters, merging some into composites and otherwise messing with what actually happened. Well, the “what actually happened” bit of it all is even scarier because as far as I am aware—and the Wikipedia entry on the so-called Saipan incident is probably much better developed than the movie—a lot of the facts have been established based on various autobiographies authored by the footballers who witnessed it. And this is scary because I have now found out that there is an entire subgenre of non-fiction writing dealing exclusively with (mostly ghost-written) autobiographies of athletes, all of which most likely look very much alike. And I don’t mean the top shelf here. In addition to your Beckhams and Linekers there’s an entire slew of books documenting the lives of athletes you probably never heard of. And good on them. Let’em rip. But it puts me in a weird position because if a guy who wore a numbered jersey for a living for twenty years and never got even close to the pinnacle of his profession can write and publish a memoir (or get interviewed enough times for a professional writer to turn these interviews into a narrative), then maybe I—a veritable nobody—should write a memoir too. And this is a pressure I didn’t need this movie to exert on me completely by accident. I’ve got enough on my plate, thank you.

At this point, you might ask yourself why I’m telling you all this and whether I should spend some time discussing the movie instead. I would if I could. But there isn’t much to discuss. Roy Keane feels a bit miffed about the idea of interacting with his manager. He goes to Saipan for a few days thinking they’d be prepping for the World Cup, while this is more of an R&R kind of trip organized by the Irish Football Association to acclimate the team to the humidity and temperature they would expect to encounter in Tokyo, and to get them through the inevitable jet lag associated with having to travel through so many time zones. He gets pissed, wants to go home, has a few rows with his manager. He doesn’t like the food, the pitch or the lack of footballs. He goes and spills his guts in front of a reporter and then he berates his boss in front of his team in what apparently was a ten-minute-long rant. He gets cut from the team. Ireland goes to the World Cup and—surprise, surprise—they don’t win. But they put up a good fight. The end.

The tension is tame. The scandal is a bit bland. The supposedly internalized drama is mostly telegraphed. Consequently, the movie adds up to a grand total of not a whole lot. I suppose you could point to it being aesthetically reminiscent of Sofia Coppola movies or that one or two jokes in the film land the way they should. But it still brings me back to my original question: is this enough for this movie to exist?
I suppose you could latch onto the only meta-textual conversation embedded in the narrative, that pertains to what might be a relatable conflict between different archetypes of Irish identity espoused by Keane and McCarthy, which seem to be at loggerheads here. But again, this is a theme explored in passing and given just about enough attention to warrant its existence at all, but not enough to make the viewer naturally gravitate to it as the central tenet of the narrative.

In the end, Saipan is nothing more than an excuse to dress actors in era-appropriate clothing, play some pop hits from the time in the background and tell a story that wasn’t really a story worth telling. Unless of course the filmmakers were after making the viewers who are old and lucid enough at the time remember that Roy Keane didn’t go to the World Cup in 2002 and that it was apparently a mild scandal. But the film as a whole doesn’t have enough bite or identity to rise above the sparse material it decided to recount, which makes me want to file it under “W” for “Who gives a toss.”