Mark Reviews Movies: NOTHING COMPARES

Nothing Compares, Showtime Documentary Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 22, 2022

The list of people who owe Sinéad O'Connor an apology is a long one. Some will remember her brief rise to stardom in the late 1980s and mainly in the early '90s, and that story amounts to about the first half or so of Kathryn Ferguson's documentary Nothing Compares. Most, however, will recall—since it was the only thing people seemed to talk about for a couple weeks in 1992—when she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II at the end of a performance on "Saturday Night Live."

Everybody discussed, mostly with outrage and occasionally in threatening terms, the infamous act, but at the time, nobody, it seems, cared to consider the motivation of her protest. O'Connor wasn't hiding her reason. People just had to either listen to her or ask the singer why she did what she did. That's not typically a thing people think to do when they're angry, and when it comes to entire countries mostly joining together in shared and misplaced indignation, the mob of public opinion isn't a self-reflective or thoughtful entity.

Explaining her rationale probably wouldn't have helped her at time. As a modern-day O'Connor points out in this film, people weren't ready to even consider that the Catholic Church would cover up abusive behavior within its various institutions. Less than a decade later, that same pope would offer the first public acknowledgment of that fact, and in the decades since, revelations of the scope and severity of that problem have made it common, accepted knowledge.

The apologies to O'Connor should have come already, but if public anger is sudden and loud and quick to burn out, public forgetfulness lasts. O'Connor is still working, releasing albums and performing live, and that's a good thing to hear. It's depressing that this probably will be first time most people will be made aware of that fact, but such is the sad state for people who, decades later, prove themselves to be ahead of the social and cultural curve.

O'Connor was, to be sure, and while Ferguson's film serves as a fine biographical account of its subject's personal and professional and political sides, it's better, perhaps, as an act of setting the record straight. It's belated, obviously, but that's not the film's problem. It's ours.

The structure here is straightforward and chronological, but Ferguson goes deeper than just explaining when and where certain details, memories, and events occurred. O'Connor's childhood, for example, is key to understanding how she developed a passion for music, recalling her father singing to her at bedtime and her mother's valued record collection.

She was a "problem child," a TV interviewer posits in one of her early publicity appearances (The same man appears every so often and clearly grows in his admiration for her over the years), and after being expelled from various schools in a single year, a young O'Connor ended up in boarding home run by the local Catholic Church. There, she was a first-hand witness to some of the women of the notorious Magdalene Laundries—elderly, locked away, and still a secret at that time she encountered them. She understood their situation, just as she would deeply empathize with the reports of sexual abuse by Catholic officials that would lead her to destroy a picture of the pope on television.

O'Connor's own mother was abusive, and while the singer doesn't go into details, Ferguson draws a line from that experience to the increasingly personal nature of her music (A record company executive refused to release her second album on the label, simply because he thought it sounded like a "diary") and her steadfast political activism. Even in her late teens and early 20s, the soft-spoken O'Connor, whose personality during interviews belies the intensity of her performance and the passion of her politics, comes across as both wise and humble. This is the woman who upset so many and had famous actors, radio DJs, and television personalities mocking and even threatening physical violence against her? In seeing her sincerity and hearing her thoughtfulness on so many occasions in this documentary, the film puts all of that outrage into a clear context. It's not O'Connor's problem. It's theirs.

In the portrait drawn by the film, everything about O'Connor comes down to sincerity. Here's an artist who doesn't write music and sing to become famous but as a pure act of personal expression. We can tell, not only because the nature of her songs (She explains the story behind one that indirectly addresses her mother's abuse, while noting that the whole point of writing it was so that one day she wouldn't have to perform it any longer), but also because of how she responded to the controversy that ended that international fame. She could have quit, or she could have apologized. She did neither and would do it again, because she knew she was correct. Now, the world knows that to be true, too.

O'Connor was right about a lot that we now take for granted—the inherent racism of censorship efforts against rap and hip-hop music at the time, the need for Ireland to separate its government from the influence of the Catholic Church, the insidious and censorious nature of the reactionary politics of jingoism and nationalism that first started negative sentiment against her in the United States. "They tried to bury me," O'Connor says near the end of Nothing Compares. "They didn't realize I was a seed." That's damn right.

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