The Butcher Boy (1997) on Netflix
Twelve-year-old Francie Brady and his friend Joe Purcell fill their days in a small Irish town with television aliens and comic-book monsters. Francie's mother is unwell, and his father drinks.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.1/1010,819 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes77%
Trailer
Plot summary
Francie Brady, twelve years old, lives in the small Irish town of Clones in the early 1960s, and his imagination is fed by television: aliens, communists, the threat of nuclear annihilation. Joe Purcell is his closest companion, and the two boys trade talk of gangsters, cowboys and monsters. At home, Francie's mother is unwell and his father, distant and bad-tempered, drinks. A quarrel with another boy, Phillip Nugent, and with Phillip's mother, Mrs. Nugent, sharpens into a lasting conflict. As his circumstances worsen, Francie retreats into a fantasy world of his own, and the world inside his head grows harder to separate from the world outside.
Cast
- Alan Boyleas Joe Purcell
- Andrew Fullertonas Phillip Nugent
- Anita Reevesas Mrs. Coyle
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Butcher Boy (1997)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Butcher Boy was the last film The Geffen Film Company produced until 2024's Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, coming out shortly before Geffen's original company was folded into Warner Bros. in 1998.
- Neither of the two boys who play Francie and his best friend Joe had ever acted before; they were discovered at a local school in Killeshandra, County Cavan, purely because casting assistant Maureen Hughes happened to be visiting her uncle there.
- Novelist Patrick McCabe wrote two screenplay drafts that Neil Jordan felt spiraled away from the book, like "planets within planets within planets," so Jordan himself ended up writing the third, more faithful draft.
SPOILER
The filmmakers changed the novel's ending: instead of remaining in prison and forming a bond with a fellow inmate as in the book, Francie is shown released decades later to a halfway house, picking a snowdrop that echoes the film's opening image.
