Saipan film review and star rating: ★★★★
Even by football fan standards, the feud between former Republic of Ireland manager Mick McCarthy and player-captain Roy Keane during the 2002 World Cup has become a niche reference. So could this film be for you if you don’t follow football? Yes, absolutely – don’t let the machismo image put you off this compelling tale that reaches far beyond the pitch.
In fact, football barely gets a look in: directors Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa want you to experience the fascinating psychology of stress, as Roy Keane has a blistering fall out with McCarthy during a week spent on the island of Saipan a fortnight before the World Cup, where they went to acclimatise to Japanese time and the weather (this actually happened in real life).
Saipan: film has UK premiere at London Film Festival
Caged up in a crappy hotel with bad food, no air conditioning and no footballs, Steve Coogan and Éanna Hardwicke are blisteringly good as the warring duo. Less brawny stand-offs, Saipan instead offers tender examinations of Keane and McCarthy’s psyches. Coogan has the gravitas to pull off McCarthy’s passivity and down-to-earth nature, but Irish actor Hardwicke is excellent as Keane, presenting a sympathetic portrait that is one fifth blistering anger but mostly an image of an intellectual who is just totally overwhelmed. There are interesting uses of light and David Holmes’ mesmeric soundtrack as Keane languishes alone in the hotel, torn between continuing with playing or calling it quits and acknowledging that his relationship with McCarthy is untenable.
Saipan is particularly stylish: in one scene, Hardwicke’s Keane sits in an elaborate rattan chair looking totally wrecked as he watches three lizards fighting, with the island of Saipan unfolding in rolls behind him. There’s a funny bit about hotel staff carting about a giant Roy Keane head in an attempt to impress him. It’s one of a cohort of sublime bits that get at how the tonally tightwalk between celebration, escapism and misery – other escapist scenes show the rest of the team laughing on banana boats and doing salsa dances in the hotel grounds as Keen seethes holed up in his room alone.
Football is one of the ripest grounds for drama, of course it is – Saipan’s great success is in knowing that this story is worthy of a broader audience than the middle aged people who followed this actually play out over twenty years ago. The pitch barely gets a look-in: instead you leave with buckets of empathy for both McCarthy and Keane, despite their objective muck-ups. It ends a bit abruptly, but I guess that couldn’t be truer to the subject matter. A nostalgia fest for a certain few but a fascinating character study for the rest of us.
Saipan premiered at the London Film Festival – here are our best picks from the event.