The Butcher Boy (1997 film)

The Butcher Boy is an 1997 Irish tragicomic drama film adapted to film by Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe from McCabes 1992 novel of the same name.

The film is set Ireland in the early 1960s in the small town of Clones. Francie Brady Eamonn Owens is a 12yearold boy whose imagination is fuelled by television aliens, communists, the Atomic Age. When his mother Aisling OSullivan suffers a nervous breakdown and ultimately commits suicide, he is left in the care of his father Stephen Rea, an emotionally distant and illtempered alcoholic. Francie spends most of his time with his best friend Joe Purcell Alan Boyle talking about gangsters, cowboys and Indians, comicbook monsters and the early1960s threat of nuclear annihilation. However, when Francies growing conflict with another boy, Phillip Nugent Andrew Fullerton, and his mother Fiona Shaw begins to go too far, he ends up at reform school. Here, he is molested by a priest Milo OShea, and finds solace only in his fantasies about a foulmouthed Virgin Mary Sinad OConnor. He returns home to find Joe has outgrown him and befriended Phillip Nugent. Before long, his father has drunk himself to death. Faced with being left completely alone in the world, Francie loses his grip on reality and lashes out with uncontrollable brutality, which shocks his provincial hometown.This was the final film produced by Geffen Pictures, which distributed its films through Warner Bros. Geffen Pictures would be sold to Universal Studios years later. ........

Source: Wikipedia