Film Review: Circle of Friends (dir by Pat O’Connor)

Posted on March 17, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

1995’s Circle of Friends tells the story of three friends who come of age in 1950s Ireland.

Bernadette Hogan (Minnie Driver), better known as Benny, is our narrator, the daughter of a local tailor whose shyness and insecurity disguises a quick mind and a sarcastic wit. After years of jokes about her weight (which feel particularly cruel since Benny doesn’t appear to be particularly overweight), Benny has resigned herself to being alone. Her parents may want her to marry their accountant, Sean Walsh (Alan Cumming), but Sean is obviously a creep. He’s one of those guys who drinks his tea with his pinky extended. Everyone knows better than to trust him.

Eve (Geraldine O’Rawe) is an orphan and was largely raised in a convent. Now that she’s 18, the Westawards — the protestant heretics who once employed her father — are grudgingly keeping their promise and paying for her education. She gets 60 pounds per term. (I know my uncle, who paid my college tuition, would have loved it if my college tuition had been whatever the American equivalent of 60 pounds may be.) Eve has inherited a cottage, a nice and isolated little building that becomes quite important later on in the film.

And finally, there’s Nan (Saffron Burrows). Nan grew up with Bernadette and Eve, though her family eventually moved to Dublin. Benny says that Nan is destined to be known for being pretty.

Nan is reunited with Benny and Eve when they all enroll at University College Dublin. The film follows their friendship at the college, examining how they grow and change over the course of the term. Benny develops a crush on and eventually starts dating Jack Foley (Chris O’Donnell), a medical student who enjoys playing rugby. (I’ve never quite understood rugby, to be honest. It seems weird to me that everyone always starts all huddled up and then apparently, they all try to grab a muddy ball until someone ends up with a compound fracture. I’m not sure why someone would want to risk losing a limb over a game.) Eve dates Jack’s friend, Aidan (played by a young Aiden Gillen). And Nan …. at first glance, Nan would seem to be living every film lover’s dream! Not does she lose her virginity to a character played by Colin Firth (in this case, Firth is playing Simon Westward) but they also regularly have sex in Eve’s lovely little cabin. Of course, they don’t bother to let Eve know what they’re doing. That’s part of the forbidden appeal of it all! Unfortunately, despite being played by Colin Firth, Simon turns out to be a bit of cad.

Indeed, all of the men turn out to be a bit of a disappointment, though some do manage to redeem themselves. The film is less about Benny finding love and more about Benny discovering that it’s even more important to love and respect herself. As so often happens when it comes to lifelong friends, there are some struggles. Not all of the friendships survive. Unfortunately, that’s just a part of growing up. Still, Benny, Eve, and Nan are all wonderfully written and acted characters and the film does a great job of portraying their difficult but very true-to-life relationship.

Circle of Friends is a lovely film and a personal favorite of mine. Unfortunately, it’s not always an easy film to watch. It’s not streaming on any of the usual services. However, the film has been uploaded to YouTube so be sure to watch it while you can.

Back to School #48: Scent of a Woman (dir by Martin Brest)

Posted on September 12, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Along with my current series of 80 Back to School reviews (48 down, 32 to go!), another one of my long time goals has been to watch and review every single film to ever be nominated for the best picture. So, imagine how happy I was to discover that by watching the 1992 film Scent of a Woman, I could make progress towards completing two goals at once! Not only was Scent of A Woman nominated for best picture of the year (losing to Unforgiven) but it also features a major subplot about life and discipline at an exclusive New England prep school! Even better, it’s been showing up on Showtime fairly regularly for the past month or so.

“Wow,” I thought as my boyfriend and I sat down to watch this movie, “could life get any easier? Or better?”

And then we watched the film.

You know how occasionally you watch a film just because you’ve heard that it was nominated (or perhaps even won) an Oscar or because it has an oddly high rating over at the imdb or maybe because someone said, “Roger Ebert loved this film so, if you don’t watch and love it, that means that, by that standard of the current online film community, you really don’t love movies?” And then you watch the movie and you’re just like, “What the Hell?”

Well, that was kind of my reaction to Scent of a Woman.

Look, the film’s not all bad. It has a few good performances. It looks great. It’s certainly better than Gigli, the film that director Martin Brest is perhaps best remembered for. It features a great scene where Al Pacino (playing a blind man) dances the tango with a woman that he’s just met. (Then again, I have a notorious weakness for dance scenes…) It’s not so much that the film is bad as much as it’s just that the movie itself is not particularly good.

Charlie Simms (Chris O’Donnell) is a scholarship student at an exclusive prep school in Massachusetts. Much like Brendan Fraser in School Ties, 1992’s other prep school melodrama, Charlie is a poor kid attending the school on a scholarship. While his rich friends prepare to go home for the Thanksgiving weekend, Charlie knows that there’s no way that he can afford to fly back to Oregon. In order to raise the money so that he can at least go back home for Christmas (how poor is this kid’s family!?), Charlie gets a temporary job for the weekend. His job? To look after Lt. Col. Frank Slade (Al Pacino), who is blind and yells a lot.

Anyway, as you can probably guess, Frank convinces Charlie to drive him to New York and they have all of the adventures that usually happen whenever a naive teenager spends the weekend with a suicidal blind man. Frank bellows a lot and tells about how, through his sense of smell, he can always tell when there’s a beautiful woman nearby. Frank also yells a lot. Did I already mention that? Because, seriously, he yells a lot.

Charlie has other problems than just Frank. It seems that a rather mild prank was pulled on the headmaster (James Rebhorn) of Charlie’s school. As a result, a bucket of paint was poured down on both the headmaster and his new car! Now, the headmaster is looking for those responsible. He just needs two witnesses. He’s already gotten one student to confess. And now, he’s blackmailing Charlie with a letter of recommendation to Harvard. All Charlie has to do is name names and his future is set…

Will Charlie name names and sacrifice his honor just to get into a college that could assure him a great life? Or will Frank convince Charlie that honor is the only thing that matters? And finally, will the film end with a big hearing in front of the entire school in which the headmaster attempts to badger Charlie, just to be interrupted by a sudden appearance from bellowing Frank Slade?

Will it!?

You can probably already guess and, since we have a no spoiler policy here at the Lens, I’ll just assume that you guessed right. (Or you could just look at the picture at the top of this review…)

The prep school subplot pretty much just adds to the film’s already excessive running time. But it is interesting to watch because the other student — the one who names names — is played by a very young Philip Seymour Hoffman. (Or as he’s credited here, Philip S. Hoffman.) This was one of Hoffman’s first screen roles and he gives a memorable performance as an unlikable character. If you were to have seen Scent of a Woman in 1992, you would not have guessed that Philip Seymour Hoffman would eventually be an Oscar winner but you would know that he was a very talented character actor.

Otherwise, Scent of a Woman is a fairly forgettable movie. If I hadn’t known ahead of time that it was nominated for best picture, I never would have been able to guess. I’m not enough of an expert to be able to name every good 1992 film that was not nominated to make room for Scent of a Woman but I imagine that when that year’s Oscar nominations were announced, there were quite a few people left scratching their heads.

Can you figure out which one grew up to be Philip Seymour Hoffman?

Back to School #47: School Ties (dir by Robert Mandel)

Posted on September 11, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For the past two and a half weeks, we’ve been reviewing 80 of the best, worst, most memorable, and most forgettable high school films ever made. We’ve been going in chronological order, starting with two films from 1946 and then working our way through the years that followed. After 46 reviews, we are now ready to enter the 1990s.

And what better way to kick off the 90s than by taking a look at a film from 1992 that very few people seem to have ever heard of?

School Ties takes place in the 1950s, which of course means that everyone dresses like either James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause or Troy Donaue in A Summer Place. It also means that the soundtrack is full of the same songs that tend to turn up in every film about the 1950s. David Greene (Brendan Fraser) is a working-class teen from Pennsylvania* who wins a football scholarship to attend an exclusive prep school in Massachusetts. At first, David struggles to fit in. Not only are all of his classmates rich but they’re also extremely anti-Semitic. However, David wins them over by playing hard on the football field and hiding the fact that he’s Jewish. However, when the jealous Charlie Dillon (Matt Damon) discovers that David is a Jew, he reveals his secret and David is forced to confront his prejudiced classmates.

School Ties is one of those extremely well-intentioned films that’s never quite as good as you might hope. With the exception of David and Charlie, the characters are all pretty thinly drawn and there’s more than a few subplots that really don’t really work. For instance, Zeljko Ivanek shows up playing a sadistic French teacher who harasses one of Fraser’s friends (played by Andrew Lowery) and, as I watched Ivanek drive Lowery to the point of a nervous breakdown over proper verb conjugation, it occurred to me that I knew Ivanek was evil as soon as he showed up wearing his little bow tie and his beret. (It’s also interesting how French teachers are always evil in films like this.)

That said, the message of School Ties is still a timely one. On the surface, the message of “Don’t be an intolerant, prejudiced prick,” might seem pretty simplistic and self-explanatory. However, every day we’re confronted with evidence that there are still people out there who don’t understand this simple concept. As such, it’s a message that can stand being repeated a few times.

(Seriously, don’t be an intolerant, prejudiced prick.)

When seen today, School Ties is mostly interesting for who appears in it. For instance, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Cole Hauser all show up here, 5 years before they would all co-star in Good Will Hunting. One of the anti-Semitic students is played by Anthony Rapp who, a year later, would appear with Affleck and Hauser in Dazed and Confused. Fraser’s sympathetic roommate is played by Chris O’Donnell. As for Brendan Fraser himself, it’s a bit odd to see him playing such a dramatic role but he’s convincing and believable as a football player. It’s a good-looking cast and yes, you better believe that there’s a fight scene that takes place in a shower. If you’ve ever wanted to see Brendan Fraser and Matt Damon wrestling each other while naked — well, this is the film to see.

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* Interestingly enough, David’s family lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania so I guess David could very well have gone to elementary school with Joe Biden and he may have family working at Dunder-Mifflin.