`MICHAEL COLLINS' GIVES US REVELATIONS ABOUT REVOLUTION.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

When Woodrow Wilson saw D.W. Griffith's 1915 epic ``The Birth of a Nation'' - not too long before Irish revolutionaries fired the first shots to establish their own nation - the president declared that the groundbreaking movie was ``like writing history with lightning.''

Eight decades later, lightning's struck again. ``Michael Collins,'' Neil Jordan's picture about the legendary, still-controversial Irish freedom fighter, makes history electric. Intimate and exciting, complicated and mad, as beautiful as it is intelligent, this film's ultimate, overriding virtue is the way it breathes. It's a vital, visceral, spinning-top-on-the-edge-of-chaos experience, the polar opposite of the stultifying stateliness that mummifies most political bio films.

Jordan drops us right into the heart of roiling, revolutionary Ireland of the teens and '20s, and - like the British and Irish factions that struggled for power in those troubled times - he never allows us a moment's peace. Of course, the director had a little help from reality. Not only were the events depicted here extraordinarily dramatic, but in Michael Collins, he has a central figure as made for Hollywood in his way as Griffith was in his.

Played at full-throttle by Liam Neeson, the Big Fella, as Collins was called, comes off as a man of many humors: affable, ruthless, regretful and, in the end, a power player who was tragically too thoughtful for his own good. That many at the time (and there are some still) considered Collins a criminal terrorist, an unforgivable traitor or the lost best hope for saving Ireland from its ongoing misery only enhances his movie mystique.

Beyond that, it's impossible not to make Collins appear heroic. Apart from a few effective flashes of the guerrilla genius in doubt, in guilt or in over his looming, usually brilliant head, writer-director Jordan does not waste time trying to undermine Collins' mythic stature.

He did jaunt brazenly about Dublin, undisguised and unrecognized, with a huge British bounty on his head. His best friend and fellow rebel, Harry Boland (a superbly conflicted Aidan Quinn), actually did love the same woman, Kitty Kiernan (Julia Roberts, fine except when she tries to approximate Maureen O'Hara feistiness under siege conditions). When Collins' assassins took out a dozen-odd British agents in separate hits one Bloody Sunday, England's Black and Tan bully squad retaliated by machine-gunning the crowd at a soccer game.

Jordan shows us all this and infinitely more mostly in quick, expertly staged scenes; cinematographer Chris Menges, production designer Anthony Pratt and editors J. Patrick Duffner and Tony Lawson all perform at the highest levels of their crafts. Especially impressive - for this is a film without a single weak shot - is the ``Godfather''-style Bloody Sunday montage, in which Collins lovingly unloads his hopes and fears on Kiernan while his boys, all good Catholics well aware of their sins, kill their enemies up close and devastatingly personal.

This section, the best of its kind since Coppola, is so good that Jordan echoes it at the end, as Collins approaches his own fate. But as deft as he is at drawing human faces on what history shrouds as a murky terrorist war, Jordan is even better at making sense of complicated political chicanery. The rough-and-tumble of nation-building sprawls along in all its glorious mess.

And at the center of it all is the intriguing gamesmanship between Collins and his mentor-turned-enemy Eamon De Valera (Alan Rickman, expertly mixing cunning, egotism and surprising dry humor). Indeed, whenever Neeson's passionate, straightforward Collins is contrasted with Rickman's calculating master strategist, the whole of Irish politics - of most all politics - feels like it has been distilled into their rivalry.

Unavoidably, ``Michael Collins'' takes a few liberties with the record. The director freely admits, for example, that the double agent Ned Broy (played by the star of Jordan's ``The Crying Game,'' Stephen Rea) combines the real historical figure with several others like him. And to be sure, the complexity of events and sympathies that occurred back then have been necessarily simplified. Trying to explain it all, it can be assumed, would have led down a path to madness.

But quite marvelously, ``Michael Collins'' gets so much across, with more impact, about the whys and wherefores of this fascinating story, it's like being struck by history's lightning bolt. Though its heart beats to the one in Michael Collins' larger-than-life breast, this is one political movie that, after insistently asking which side you are on, acknowledges that the answer to that is never simple or easy.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Michael Collins'' (R; violence, language).

The stars: Liam Neeson, Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea, Alan Rickman, Julia Roberts.

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Neil Jordan. Produced by Stephen Woolley. Released by Warner Bros.

Playing: Century 14, Century City; Criterion, Santa Monica.

Our rating: Four Stars.

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Photo

Photo: Liam Neeson as the title character and Aidan Quinn a s Harry Boland, both at right, surrender to British troops in ``Michael Collins.''