"Belfast" -- Movie Review

 

This week at Lincoln Center, I attended a screening of the new historical drama, “Belfast”, written and directed by Kenneth  Branagh. 

Synopsis

During the cataclysmic times of Northern Ireland, can a family survive in the city of Belfast?

Story

In 1969, the city of Belfast is being torn apart with violence.  Neighbors are fighting neighbors because of religion:  Protestants versus Catholics.  For some, there is a quest for what they consider “purity”:  Protestants shouldn’t live in Catholic neighborhoods and vice versa.  One must drive out the other, no matter how peacefully they may try to live and get along with each other.  To make matters worse, Belfast leads the entire United Kingdom in unemployment.  With jobs being so scarce, some are forced to leave home in order to get a job; one Protestant man (Jamie Dornan) must leave his wife (Caitriona Balfe) and sons Buddy (Jude Hill) and Will (Lewis McAskie) for weeks at a time to support them working on a construction job in England. 

Buddy, the younger of the two boys, is certainly aware of the danger in which he exists, but nevertheless tries to live a normal life, despite struggles academically, domestically and socially.  Things get so bad in fact that his father seriously considers uprooting the family and moving them as far away as he possibly can to avoid trouble – he considers Canada and Australia among his best available options.  The mother is strongly opposed to this, in large part because she’s lived in Belfast her entire life and she can’t bear the thought of leaving their relatives.  Buddy also doesn’t want to leave either his grandparents (Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds) or his friends. 

Eventually, the family reaches an untenable situation when one of the town’s gang leaders threatens the family:  although he’s a fellow Protestant, he wants Buddy’s father to pay him for protection.  The father rejects this shakedown and calls him out for being the no-good thug that he is, noting his incitement of violence merely exposes how insignificant he truly feels.  It becomes clear that the father will not be able to escape matters much longer; when a riot breaks out, the thug endangers the entire family.  If the father can save his wife and children, will they remain in Belfast or finally take this as a sign to move? 

Review

Today, if you were to tell millennials that there was once a city in Northern Ireland in the 20^th century that was the center of criminal violence, anarchy and chaos, they probably wouldn’t believe you.  Furthermore, if you explained to them that the reason why the violence occurred was due to the fact that Protestants and Catholics were unable to live together peacefully, they’d likely stare at you like you’re out of your mind.  Yet all of it is based in historical fact and if you’re old enough to have lived through that time, you may well remember seeing all of this play out on the television nightly news. 

Branagh’s film purports to be a dramatic re-enactment of his childhood memories from that time and place.  While it starts with great authenticity and verisimilitude, it becomes a little treacly and mawkish.  There is also something of a structural problem in the third act in the sense that “Belfast” gives us something of a false ending which psychologically makes the audience believe that the movie is over; despite that seeming resolution, it then continues a while longer, which can be a bit confusing or disconcerting to the audience.  It’s too bad because the film could have wrapped up much more efficiently following that scene; it detracts from what otherwise was a rather compelling story.

One of the conceits of “Belfast” is the fact that most of it is in black and white – think Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma”.  This is seemingly done in order to show audiences that this is a “memory movie” – that is to say, the adult’s childhood memory from that time is without color, however you may want to interpret that.  With respect to “Belfast”, it may be because the family’s television was black and white.  There are many time-specific cultural references in “Belfast” – movies, television shows and music that are of that era (by the way, a great soundtrack with Van Morrison).  It is interesting that many of these cultural references in Ireland actually came from America.