Grade: C

The blarney runs mighty thick in “The Boys and Girl From County Clare,” an almost oppressively atmospheric, incredibly manipulative tale of family troubles in the old country, filled with past wrongs that need mending and future hopes that call for nurturing. John Irvin’s movie wants to charm the pants off us while also bringing a tear to the eye, but the utter predictability of not only the main plot but every subplot attached to it overwhelms any good will you might bring to it. This story of what goes on at an Irish music competition is a bit like “Riverdance”–you feel as though you’ve seen every number before, many times over.

The centerpiece of Nicholas Adams’ rote script, set in the mid-1960’s, is a long-simmering feud between two estranged Irish brothers, younger Jimmy (Colm Meany), a flashy, loud Liverpool businessman, and the older John Joe (Bernard Hill), who still lives quietly in County Clare. Each is a fiddler, and each has assembled a Ceili band to play in a big annual competition. The first act of the movie involves the efforts to the two men to sabotage the other’s chances by delaying his arrival (Jimmy arranges the theft of the wheels from John Joe’s van, while John Joe arranges to have Jimmy’s group halted at the border). But neither plan succeeds, and soon the two bands, each composed of a bunch of colorful types, are facing off. The situation is exacerbated by the presence in John Joe’s group of Maisie (Charlotte Bradley), a morose pianist who’s also the overprotective mother of talented fiddler Anne (Andrea Corr), and who holds a grudge against Jimmy–for reasons that are revealed only gradually but will be obvious to any sensate viewer before the first reel has unspooled. The plot thickens, as they say, when Anne catches the eye of Teddy (Shaun Evans), the flautist in Jimmy’s band, whom Maisie considers a danger to her daughter despite his obviously sweet nature. Adams tries to build some swerves into his account of their very quick romance, but the outcome is never remotely in doubt.

And that’s the essential problem in “County Clare”–not just the certitude that each and every difficulty posited in the script will work out happily, but the ease with which they’re finessed. A twenty-year feud between two brothers? Nothing that some jokes and reminiscences over a few pints of ale won’t fix. A mother’s obsession that her daughter not make the same mistakes she did? Oh, just allow for a modest row and understanding will follow on both sides. Even winning the competition, which is presented as all-important to both sides, is in final analysis brushed off with a joke out of left field; though there’s a telegraphing of the twist in an early scene, it’s far too slight to serve as a respectable clue. There’s also a habit on the part of both Adams and Irvin to indulge in slapdash, obvious gags in a rather desperate effort to generate some disarming local color. People throw up–always after drinking too heavily–much too often, for instance. And they tumble into the sea for laughs too frequently as well. There are also plenty of children around, and they repeatedly become the stuff of laughs by receiving a cuff on the noggin from some passing adult. These bits of business were old when silents switched over to sound.

There’s some consolation to the staleness of the script, which in the end resolves itself so smoothly that it seems the stuff of a heavy-handed Celtic fairy-tale, in the widecreen lensing of Thomas Burstyn, whose mahogany-colored images have a certain burnished beauty, and the music, even if we don’t hear as much of it as one might wish. The cast certainly gives the material more than its due. Meany, who in this kind of hustler’s role recalls more than a little George Cole’s Flash Harry from the St. Trinian’s movies, is nicely contrasted with Hill’s softer, well-weathered John Joe, who doesn’t push too hard. Corr, from the Irish pop group of the same name, shouldn’t, on the evidence here, give up her musical career for acting, but she does well enough, and Evans makes an agreeably shy lovesick swain. The array of eccentrics surrounding the main players are amiable enough, but Bradley can’t do much with a part that mostly requires her to scowl and mope before breaking out abruptly in smiles and hugs at the end.

“The Boys and Girl From County Clare” (the title has been lengthened from the original “The Boys From County Clare”) is, in contrast to many pictures out there, nice and unthreatening, and one suspects that older viewers will take to its easygoing, undemanding brand of ethnic and period humor, appreciative of the predictability rather than annoyed by it. But the fact of the matter is that it feels very much like used goods.