GARAGE REVIEWS
	The Independent (English) Reviewed by Anthony Quinn Friday, 7 March 2008 The director-writer team of Lenny Abrahamson and Mark O'Halloran have followed up their superb odd-couple tragicomedy Adam & Paul (2004) with a film that's even more laconic and touching in its portrayal of narrow lives. Pat Shortt plays Josie, a gentle and rather simple fellow who tends a petrol station on the outskirts of a small Irish town. Patronised by his boss and mocked by the locals, Josie clings doggedly to his solitary routines, his only escape from monotony the secret crush he nurses on a shopgirl (Anne-Marie Duff), and the company of his new teenage assistant (Conor J Ryan), whose worldliness he badly misjudges. As a study in loneliness, this is magnificent, sparely directed by Abrahamson and beautifully played by Shortt, whose roly-poly walk and innocent gaze could break your heart, if they haven't already melted it. It should be considered one of the great performances of the year. Peter Robertson's cinematography is unobtrusively intimate, and in certain moments – Josie staring absently out of a window, bathed in light – it has the look of a modern Vermeer, while distant shots of the petrol station evoke Hopper. The film's 18 certificate is mystifying, incidentally, given that there's no sex or violence in it. Indeed, hardly anything at all seems to happen, yet in its patient detailing of a certain way of life – isolated, inarticulate, yet curiously hopeful – everything happens.   Pat Shortt shines in the comedy Garage The bittersweet Irish tale that has wowed film festival juries across Europe is about to delight Britain Wendy Ide (From The Times (England) February 23, 2008) Ireland has given the world many great things, but never, until 2004, a genuinely home-grown cult movie. That all changed with the release of Adam and Paul, the debut feature from the director Lenny Abrahamson, which followed the misadventures of two hapless junkies, and has been pithily described as “Laurel and Hardy on smack”. On its home turf, the film has become a phenomenon, with a following that extends from kids who can quote chunks of dialogue to real-life drug addicts who commend the film-makers for “getting it right”. Nearly four years on, Abrahamson is aiming to go one better with his second feature, Garage, and broaden his audience beyond cultish confines. A bittersweet, beautifully observed tragicomedy, Garage stars the Irish comedian Pat Shortt as Josie, a well-meaning misfit who works at the local petrol station and whose horizons barely extend beyond the local pub and his meagre lodgings. Gentle, eager-to-please Josie fatally misjudges the appropriateness of a friendship with David, his teenage assistant at the garage. As a result, his local community turns on him. “Josie is a bit slow, but emotionally he's incredibly vivid,” says Abrahamson. “He's a combination of not very bright in the traditional sense and also terribly shy, having been brought up in one of those Irish families of that era where they were not taught to talk about anything.” At last year's Cannes Film Festival, the film won the CICAE award, before picking up prizes in Dinard, Monte Carlo and Turin. Although the film was far from being the most hotly anticipated at the festival, the presence of Shortt, who has a huge following in Ireland, made sure that the gentle buzz surrounding it never died down. And it is his performance that makes and carries the heart of the movie with its elegant physicality. “When a person you've never met before walks into a room, you have such a strong feeling of who they are within about a second,” Shortt explains. “You see Josie the way everyone in town sees him, which is sort of as a figure of fun. The other thing is about the walk; he's leaning forward slightly, the chest is out, the hands are forward, and what it's all saying is, ‘I'm ready for requirements you may have of me.' And that's the sad thing, Josie's profound desire to please and be useful.” Hailing from rural Ireland himself, Shortt says he recognises many of the characters in the story. “There's a Josie in every village in Ireland, practically every pub has one individual like him.” Much of the film was shot in a tiny town in Tipperary, where the presence of a film crew - and particularly that of Shortt - was big news. Little things, like the decision of which of the two village pubs to frequent, were fraught with local politics. “The fellow who owned the bar we didn't go to used to drive out in his tractor when we were filming,” says Shortt. “Because he was so pissed off that we only ever drank in the other one. He used to try and mess up the sound.” Things got worse when they managed to offend the other bar's owners after an impromptu wrap party turned into a disaster. “They said, would you come down for a drink?” recalls Abrahamson. “So we went but had to work early the next day. But the priest had announced in Mass that Pat Shortt would be there and they came from miles around. And because we only stayed for a couple of hours and didn't get absolutely langered with them, they thought that we were stuck up.” Abrahamson made amends by inviting the landlord and his wife to an early screening of the film. “They came out really moved. If you like Josie and you care about him, I think you will be moved by it.” The Telegraph 07/03/2008 | Sukhdev Sandhu Garage, written by Mark O'Halloran and directed by Lenny Abrahmson, is a magnificent film about a man of the kind we all know. Sweet, courteous, middle-aged, a bachelor. The kind of man who lives in bedsits or in his deceased parents' home. The kind of man teenagers rag. Here, played by Pat Shortt, he's called Josie and works as a petrol-pump attendant in a small Irish village. The locals treat him benignly, though also as a punchbag when they're macho, or as a teddy bear when they're drunk and sorry for themselves. "You're pure soft," one exclaims; her compliment an unwitting put-down. Josie befriends a 15-year-old boy who helps out at the garage. They go to evening bonfires, knock back a can of beer or two. Then, quietly and without the kind of screamy theatrics into which weaker films would have descended, things start to go heartbreakingly awry. Shortt gives a performance that is brave, true, unsentimental, free of pathos. The photography - of a beautiful countryside full of green fields, glowering clouds and streams that only look tranquil - is casually accomplished. O'Halloran's screenplay has a sparse delicacy that can evoke mountains of emotion in the gaps between sentences. Abrahamson's meticulous, empathetic tracking of his lead character is worthy of the Dardennes brothers. Films like Garage come along all too rarely. See it. Cherish it. watch