Cast: Catríona Balfe, Judi Dench, Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds, Colin Morgan, Jude Hill
Director: Kenneth Branagh
Writer: Kenneth Branagh
If two points are all you need to draw a straight line, then there appears to be a trend in cinema today, between Roma, Cold War, and now Belfast, of famous directors producing black-and-white semi-autobiographical films drawn from the memories of their childhood. In Branagh’s case, it’s Northern Ireland in the late 60s, when the tumultuous nationalistic and religious conflict known as The Troubles first broke out. As a director, Branagh’s forte has tended towards adaptations of British literary classics, most famously Shakespeare, but also Agatha Christie and Mary Shelley. Even his forays into more mainstream genres in his work with Disney (i.e. Thor and Cinderella) are rooted to some extent in the western canon. This makes Belfast a departure for him, even as it marks his most personal feature to date. And, as befits a story drawn from one’s personal memories of childhood, it is very clearly a lovingly made film. The black-and-white cinematography, courtesy of frequent collaborator Haris Zambarloukos, is crisp and beautiful to look at. There is a wholesome sense of humour and uplifting musicality to the story that makes for a winning, crowd-pleasing experience. The actors are uniformly great and are all clearly invested in the film Branagh has set out to make. Yet ultimately the film feels less than the sum of its parts; there isn’t anything wrong with it, but something is missing.
After opening with a tonal montage of Belfast as it exists today in full colour, the film takes us back in time to August 1969. Buddy (newcomer Jude Hill), is a nine-year-old boy living on the kind of Belfast street where everyone knows and talks to each other, the road itself is the children’s playground, and the world beyond their idyllic neighbourhood seems not to exist. He lives with his Ma (Outlander star Catríona Balfe) and older brother Will (Lewis McAskie) while his Pa (Jamie Dornan) works as a joiner in London and comes home every other weekend. After school he’ll often stop to see his Pop (Ciarán Hinds) and Granny (Judi Dench) to ask them for advice about the girl he fancies at school or confide in with his worries about his parents. It’s not a cutesy Enid Blyton childhood he enjoys, but it also isn’t a very difficult one, at least not initially. That changes when the troubles beyond their quaint street, a street where Protestants and Catholics still live side-by-side, come rearing in as Protestant rioters suddenly appear to terrorise those Catholic neighbours, breaking windows, throwing bricks, and setting cars aflame. Branagh’s deft hand is at work in this sequence, showing the riot from such an array of angles and perspectives that the chaos and terror of it all is made fully visceral.
The rest of the film though plays as a romantic, feel-good coming-of-age story, which just doesn’t fit quite right for me. Perhaps the issue I take is that the film is too lovingly made, that Branagh is looking into his past through rose-tinted glasses that obscure rather than reveal the deeper story he’s trying to tell of what it felt like to live through this distressing time as a child. The parents come across more as archetypes than characters, he as the decent everyman who wants to do right by his family but refuses to do so through violent means and she as the put-upon mother trying to keep everyone afloat while everything else crumbles around them and who feels too strongly tied to her Irish roots to ever leave the only home she and her children have ever known. I am confident that this idealisation is by design and it works up to a point; both parents are as beautiful as the movie stars in the pictures Buddy loves so dearly, they are both Protestants who have no problems at all with Catholics, and the only real conflict that exists between them is whether they should leave Belfast, a prospect that the mother passionately exclaims her objections to in an affective monologue. It all works fine for what it is, but it still feels too clean, too pure for what was such a messy and turbulent time in Ireland’s recent history.
Branagh creates a vivid, picturesque depiction of the world that Buddy (i.e. he) grew up in, but the character himself is pretty underdeveloped (Hill for his part is terrific, save in a few instances when he’s clearly been overdirected). He has a crush on a Catholic girl at a school and wants to brush up on his studies to impress her, he is shaken by the sermon of a fire-and-brimstone preacher and draws a literal map of the roads to heaven and hell that he describes, and he has a deep love of film and theatre, as marked by the presence of colour in the scenes in which he attends a showing. Any and all of these are threads that add detail and life to the character and his story, but none of them really go anywhere or leave that deep of an impression. When it comes down to it, everything about this film just feels anecdotal; the individual scenes work in the moment, they score the laughs and the tears that they’re going for, but they’re too disjointed and they don’t linger. There isn’t enough conflict to provide a tangible through-line or thematic development to create a greater resonance. The memories that Branagh conjures are striking and immaculate, but what’s missing is a point-of-view, a sense of what is driving Branagh in bringing these memories to life.
The main takeaway is that Belfast is fine; it is a well-made film with great performances (Hinds and Dench in particular are superb) and I’m glad Branagh got to make it because the story clearly means a great deal to him on a deeply personal level. It’s just not in and of itself a very compelling film. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe Belfast, in its fragmentary, unfocused, imperfect form, is the film that Branagh needed to make. Or maybe there was a more fully realised version of this film in his head, he just never found a way to translate it to the screen. For the departure it marks in subject matter, it is a very characteristic film for him; the performance and presentation all feels very controlled and stagey, the tone is clean and polished, and he’s made many bold, demonstrative choices in what form the film should take. He’s a lot like Tom Hooper in that way, only without the breathtaking incompetency. What sets this film apart is that it doesn’t just feel like Branagh, being the Renaissance Man that he is, trying to strut his stuff (which works wonderfully when the material is as showy and ostentatious as Shakespeare), it feels special, it feels close to his heart in a way that his other film don’t. If only he’d found a way to demonstrate exactly why this story is so special, there’d me more to latch onto then than the simply fine, good-looking, well-acted picture he’s produced.
★★★
Aled Warren Films 