Life through otherworldly eyes

Patrick "Kitten" Braden, the husky-voiced, heavy-lidded transvestite played by Cillian Murphy in Neil Jordan's "Breakfast on Pluto," wishes that everybody would stop being so serious. Which is pretty wishful as wishes go, considering Patrick/Kitten grows up gay in repressive 1960s Ireland and struggles mightily to remain glib and shallow throughout the turbulent '70s, as bombs, riots and violent clashes make the world unsafe for fabulousness.

Based on a novel by Patrick McCabe (whose novel "The Butcher Boy" Jordan adapted in 1997), "Breakfast on Pluto" presents itself as a sort of 20th century "Candide," synoptic chapter headings and all. But more than the easily influenced naif of Voltaire's masterpiece, Patrick resembles eternal optimist Pangloss, who refuses to acknowledge that the violence and brutality around him are truer expressions of human nature than his own rosy delusions.

This sort of wishful thinking was precisely what Voltaire satirized, but "Breakfast on Pluto" seems to want to cast Patrick's blinkered view of the world as a positive trait. "Through his insane insistence on seeing the world as a beautiful place," Jordan says in the press materials, "Patrick never really loses, even when he loses everything." The thing is he never really gains much, either. He sits out the decade, claiming a hangnail. In the end, his disaffection make him a singularly uninvolving character, and his disengagement makes him seem alternately shallow, selfish and perverse.

The episodic story follows Patrick's adventures in the small fictional Irish town of Tyreelin, fictionally situated near the Northern Ireland border, after he's deposited on the priest's doorstep by his mother. Eily Bergin (Eva Birthistle) worked for the priest as a housekeeper, and is famous in town for her beauty and uncanny resemblance to the film star Mitzi Gaynor. It's clear from the start that the melancholy Father Bernard (Liam Neeson) is more than just a spiritual father to the boy, but the truth is never acknowledged. When Eily skips town for London, Patrick (Conor McEvoy plays him as a youth) is placed with a foster family that takes a dim view of his style and proclivities. He survives by forming a close bond with future IRA sympathizer Irwin (Emmet Lawlor McHugh, later Laurence Kinlan), his eventual girlfriend Charlie (Bianca O'Connor, later Ruth Negga) and their innocent friend Laurence (Seamus Reilly), who has Down's syndrome and a tragic fondness for small, remote control-operated robots.