"Hostage is a crucifying aloneness. There's a silent, screaming slide into the bowels if ultimate despair. Hostage is a man hanging by his fingernails over the edge of chaos and feeling his fingers slowly straightening."
Year: 1993 Company: Granada Films (UK) and HBO (US) Running Time: 96 minutes Original US airdate: Feb 20, 8-9:45 p.m. Colin's Character:
John McCarthy
 The
story of John McCarthy (Colin's character) provides the frame for the story.
We see other kidnappings that occurred before his in a prologue and releases
after his in a summary at the end. It is very much his story and Brian
Keenan's. The original idea for the film came about while the two were
still in captivity as a way to keep their plight in front of the public.
 This
is a difficult film to watch. It makes no attempt to soften the experiences
of the hostages to please the viewer's sensibilities. And, although it
occasionally walks a thin line regarding the political aspects of the situation,
it never shirks from the main point - these men (and others like them)
spent years locked in dirty, dark rooms, never knowing from day to day
what would happen, with little news from the outside world, and no certainty
of release. It is worth noting that, while all six hostages portrayed in
this film were eventually released, other hostages were killed by their
captors.
 
Photo above right from book Some Other Rainbow by John McCarthy and Jill Morrell It's an emotional accuracy that runs through it. It doesn't matter that they don't get the facts quite right, although they did a pretty good job on it. The feelings are there, the humiliations, the anger, the frustration of not knowing, the ups and the downs. You saw some of that in the film. So, those are all true portrayals, those kinds of things did happen.
McCarthy, John, and Morrell, Jill. Some Other Rainbow. Bantam Press, 1993.
COLIN IN THE FILM Colin plays John
McCarthy. As mentioned, his role frames
Natasha Richardson (Jill Morrell) also co-starred with Colin in A Month
in the Country.
Ciaran Hinds (Brian Keenan) and Colin both had roles in Circle of Friends.
Both Colin Firth and Ciaran Hinds have portrayed Jane Austen heroes: Colin
as Darcy in the BBC/A&E mini-series, Pride and Prejudice; and Ciaran
Hinds as Captain Wentworth in the 1995 film version of Persuasion (also
shown in the U. S. on Masterpiece Theater on PBS).
The filmmakers made a mistake in their portrayal of McCarthy as a reporter;
he was, in fact, a news producer.
Colin has portrayed a well-known living person in another film: Robert
Lawrence, a soldier in the Falklands War in Tumbledown (Granada, 1989).
In real life, Jill Morrell and John McCarthy eventually broke up as a couple.
 
St. Louis Post Dispatch, February 19, 1993
professor off the streets of Beirut, beat him, humiliate him and steal
years of his life from him, and you’re making a political statement . .
. But this is not The Captors. It’s Hostages and it uses McCarthy’s confinement
as the unifying element in a story about the inhumane treatment of hostages
and the effects of that treatment on the minds and bodies of the men who
experienced it. Hostages,
a properly sobering HBO docudrama...seems longer than its 95 minutes, perhaps
because so much of it details life in bitter captivity....Scenes of the
hostages being tormented, either by their captors or by the intense sense
of loneliness and isolation, are grueling but not gratuitously violent.
Writer Bernard MacLaverty and director David Wheatley do give you an extremely
discomforting idea of what it must be like to be locked away with no concrete
hope that you will ever be released ...Hostages continues the HBO tradition
of tackling hot topics in intelligent and relatively non-hokey docudramas..
..This is television with class, and also television with guts.  If
we must have TV movies based on harrowing real-life events, let them all
be as good as Hostages, an account of the kidnapping, torture and subsequent
release of six civilians held in Lebanon in the late 1980s and early ’90s...Cut
off from the world, regularly punched and kicked by their kidnappers for
no apparent reason and left to live in a filthy room, the hostages comfort
one another but also get on one another’s nerves. The worst thing this
TV movie could have done would be to turn the hostages into bland martyrs
or ennobled victims. Instead, the script grants these men their individual,
prickly personalities.... Hostages is, in
this sense, as misleading as any other true-life TV movie [refers to shifting
chronology, changing names of minor characters, creating dialogue]. But,
on a deeper level, the uniformly quiet, passionate acting and the power
of its drama give it a thoroughly redeeming force.
Pictured: Brian Keenan campaigning for John McCarthy's release from the book Some Other Rainbow
 enough
dramatic one-upmanship, HBO has the latest from its fruitful partnerships
with the investigative filmmakers at Granada and the BBC...
 Much
of the dialogue spoken by Colin in this film focuses on McCarthy's sense
of humor, something his family and friends spoke about often and that more
than one of his fellow hostages credited with helping them survive their
ordeal. Some examples:
When McCarthy and Keenan are given a video to watch, McCarthy asks his captor: Please, sir, can we take our blindfolds off to watch it? At one point, Keenan and McCarthy are moved and join, for the first time, Anderson, Sutherland and Reed. McCarthy looks at them and says: Doesn't anyone ever kidnap any women around here? As the guard leaves the room he asks if they want anything. McCarthy quips: A taxi?  McCarthy
and Keenan are watching a video and turn the television to broadcast channels.
They happen on coverage of a benefit for McCarthy and an interview with
Jill Morrell. Watch Colin's face as he expresses the range of emotions
McCarthy feels as he sees the woman he loves: astonishment, joy, frustration.
It's a great example of Colin's phenomenal ability to convey the character's
inner self without words and almost without moving a muscle.
 are
vividly portrayed.
And, of course, the reunion scene between McCarthy and Morrell at the end. It can't be reduced to words – it must be watched.
Chris's personal
ratings:
Colin's acting ability: ***** The film in general: ***** Ranking in the films of Colin Firth: **** Watchability and rewind factor: *** (it's a hard film to watch) TOP TOP |
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For anyone intersted, the film Blind Flight is based on McCarthy's and Keenan's experience as hostages (both men cooperated in making the film whereas they did not work with the producers of Hostages). It stars Linus Roach as John McCarthy and Ian Hart as Brian Keenan |
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Based
on the real-life occurrences, this made-for-TV film is about the kidnapping
of Westerners by fundamentalist Islamic forces in Lebanon. It focuses on
the experiences of six men: John McCarthy, Brian Keenan, Terry Anderson,
Tom Sutherland, Frank Reed and Terry Waite. Although it is "reality-based"
and mixes actual news footage with the dramatized events, a disclaimer
at the beginning makes it clear that the incidents and dialogue in the
film are "based on publicly available material, interviews with former
hostages, their friends and relatives, diplomats and politicians from the
United States, Europe and the Middle East. No endorsement has been received
from anyone portrayed."
News
footage moves the story through a period of five years, showing various
events that impacted the lives and safety of the hostages. The dramatized
events focus on their day-to-day existence: the tensions of living in close 
quarters,
the relief of seeing other hostages after spending time in isolation, the
momentary laughter a game of Monopoly can bring, and so on. Contrasted
with these scenes are the efforts of families and friends (Peggy Say, Jill
Morrell and others) to keep the hostages’ names and faces in the public
eye and to attempt to force actions from hesitant governments.
the movie—the personal story of the hostages starts with his kidnapping
on April 17, 1986 and ends when he returns to England in August 1991 to
be reunited with his family and his girlfriend, Jill Morrell, who worked
hard to keep his name and plight before the public during McCarthy’s more
than five years in captivity. Although the film depends on an ensemble,
McCarthy and Keenan (Ciaran Hinds) are used to most vividly portray the
daily human plight of the hostages, and the pair has the most screen time.
McCarthy’s
character provides the humor or comic relief in the film (see below, “Favorite
Quotes and Scenes”). Yet Colin is also asked to convey much of the horror
and humiliation of being a hostage. One of the most painful scenes to watch
shows is one where Colin shows the terror that McCarthy feels at being
wrapped in tape and then unwrapped as he and Keenan are being transported
in the bottom of a truck from one location to another. The humiliation
is also clear in his initial scenes at being made a captive and later being
asked to beg to use the toilet.
Brian
Keenan and John McCarthy at McCarthy's 40th birthday celebration (Source:
Hello! magazine)