[In the following review, Moran asserts that, "Michael Collins is a superior film that presents a legitimate interpretation of Collins's life and times."]

In the various controversies that swirl around Irish history, a few historical figures serve as ideological touchstones. One's opinions about them reveal much about how one views the nature of Irish politics and questions about Irish identity. Along with Patrick Pearse and Eamonn De Valera, perhaps no person serves this role so well as Michael Collins, arguably the founder of the Irish Republican Army and the soldier who won an independent Irish state at the cost of partition, civil war, and his own life.

Michael Collins is Neil Jordan's attempt to tell the tale of Collins from his participation as a minor player in the Easter Rising of 1916 through his major role in the Irish war of independence and the Irish civil war until his death at the hands of former comrades. The film is, however, less a historical biography than a cinemagraphic portrait of the myth of Michael Collins as well as a statement about the nature of things in Ireland since 1922.

Film is a wholly different thing from history. It must compress events, can make interpretive assumptions, and is not constrained by rules of evidence. Nonetheless, in many ways, Michael Collins is faithful to the past. The film's portrayal of period Dublin is masterful and has perhaps no rival in film history. While there are occasional errors in detail, the verisimilitude here is admirable despite the film's penchant for the now de rigueur use of gray and blue in period films. Crowd scenes in particular have been shot with an eye to the original photographs and films of many of these events and are done well.

Of course, there are the usual sins of commission and omission. The film dwells too much on Kitty Kiernan, who, in her role as the female personification of Ireland, is won over by Collins's willingness to endorse violence, but who also serves as the focal point of homoerotic tension between Collins and his friend Harry Boland. Some choices, such as Collins's seeming chastity, are of little consequence, while others, such as the execution of Ned Broy or the manner of Boland's death, are significant. Broy, only one of the intelligence contacts supplying information to Collins, accompanied him on his fateful trip to London, rejected the treaty that ended the war of independence at the cost of partition, eventually served as head of the Irish police, and died an old man. Boland, by contrast, was killed rather ignominiously when Free State soldiers found him half-dressed in a hotel room in Skerries. In both cases, the truth and its implications are far more interesting than what is presented in the film.

The film also presents its hero rather simplistically. Despite brilliant acting from Liam Neeson, Collins was a far more complex and interesting character than one finds here. He came by his patriotism as an teenage expatriate living and working in London, where he was swayed by the idea of an "Irish Ireland," and he came to the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) through Gaelic games. He then learned the Irish language, and when Collins returned to Ireland in early 1916, he had come to believe, as many exiles do, with absolute certainty in the purity of a cause.

While imprisoned in Wales in 1916, Collins moved to establish his authority among his fellow prisoners. He then cultivated it through careful manipulation of his public image as a nattily dressed gunman with the mind of a banker and the tenderness of a serious Catholic. From 1917 onward, he worked tirelessly not only to gain Irish independence but to win leadership of the movement, holding key positions in both the IRB and the Irish Volunteers and alienation more than a few people in the process. His careful selection of IRB men to run in the 1918 general election was as much a tactic to secure control of the revolutionaries as it was an attempt to win a democratic mandate. If in democratic politics he could be manipulative, in matters military he was ruthless. The film actually goes easy on the British, where the Black and Tans deserved much of what they got. But Collins's "squad," which dispatched the Cairo Gang, a British counterintelligence unit, also dispatched many an Irish civilian who had different notions of what it meant to be Irish, setting the stage for the ongoing conflict we have today.

The most glaring omission in this film, from both a historical and a dramatic perspective, is that of the peace negotiations in London. De Valera, as the film implies, sent Collins on the mission doomed to failure. But it was while he was in London that Collins, courted by English society, made his, and ultimately Ireland's, fateful compromise; without this, the story of his seizure of the middle ground is inexplicable.

In the end, the film casts Collins as a martyr for that middle ground. De Valera and his followers made the mistake of taking seriously the vision of Ireland for which Collins had so successfully fought, and it is not really clear in this film how they ended up on opposite sides. Nevertheless, Michael Collins is a superior film that presents a legitimate interpretation of Collins's life and times. Many critics in England and Ireland have been discomforted by the heroic portrayal presented here, and perhaps they should be. But almost any portrayal of Collins would bring to life that unresolved thing that is Ireland. The film suggests that the middle way, then and now, might not be what it seems to be.