Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast 'Troubles': A Movie Seeking Means of Escape

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

Kenneth Branagh’s film about his childhood in Northern Ireland, shot mostly in black and white and set to the tunes of fellow Ulsterman Van Morrison, Belfast is a childhood memoir on that familiar Irish theme, exile. 

Though it won the People’s Choice Award at the recent Toronto International Film Festival - often a predictor of Oscar success -  it’s a movie best approached with modest expectations.  Belfast is Branagh’s stylized 100-minute love letter to his working-class parents, and his eight-year-old self, a sweet, pocket-sized film, dressed up in a big director’s clothes.

The family is gobsmacked by a screening of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast.

Unavoidably, Belfast draws parallels to more ambitious films. Because it’s mostly black-and-white, named after a place, and episodically structured around childhood memories and moments of magic realism, Belfast suggests Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.  Belfast also draws comparisons to John Boorman’s Second World War childhood memoir, the 1987 film, Hope and Glory.

After a brief colour introduction of the contemporary port city of Belfast, the camera glides into a black-and-white tracking shot. The date is, August, 1969, the period of the Northern Irish Riots, near the beginning of the 30 years of civil strife that eventually took 3,500 lives.  Round-faced blond nine-year-old Branagh surrogate, Buddy (Jude Hill) is playing with friends in front of the working-class row houses when there’s the sound of an explosion. Suddenly the street is inundated with torch-carrying Protestant militants, like villagers hunting Frankenstein’s monster.

In response to Catholic civil rights protests and riots, Protestant hardliners are terrorizing Catholic families, forcing them out of the mixed neighbourhood. 

Buddy’s Protestant parents (Caitriona Balfe and Jamie Dornan) and grandparents (Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench) who share their home, want no part of this sectarian ugliness (“There is no ‘our side’ and ‘their side,'” Buddy’s father tells him). But they are pushed by the hardliners to either “pay cash or commit” to the cause. 

Turmoil begets more turmoil.  Within, insolent, suspicious English soldiers have occupied the North Belfast neighbourhood, setting up checkpoints.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Da (Dornan) who travels abroad to England to work in construction, starts bringing home travel brochures to far-flung Commonwealth refuges — Sidney Australia, or Vancouver, Canada (That raises an interesting hypothetical question: What if Branagh had started his career at The Arts Club rather than the Royal Shakespeare Company?). 

In the end, the family’s choice seems pre-ordained, for as someone notes, “The Irish were born for leavin’.”

Long past his early days as a Shakespearian wunderkind, Branagh, at 60, has evolved into an established big-screen director (Thor, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit), which is not necessarily an asset.  At times, his efforts to bring epic sweep to an intimate family story feel disjointed. 

Cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, shooting in digital colour for black-and white, has created a soft monochrome palette, shot in low and wide child-perspective angles, with moments of family photo-blocking on the purpose-built set. Then, during periodic bursts of action, the calm breaks into agitated handheld-camera and 360-degree camera spins.

The most interesting idea here is the way memories of TV and the movie screens fuse with memories of real life.  The home television TV appears to show nothing except local news and Westerns (including the early years of the “space Western” Star Trek). 

In scenes where the family visits the local cinema, the screen bursts into colour as the family watches — the grandmother tsk-ing at the voluptuous Raquel Welch in a fur bikini in One Million Years B.C., or everyone jumping in awe at Dick Van Dyke in a flying car in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. These clearly signal the boy’s future career as a filmmaker. This point is especially hard to miss when we see young Buddy flipping through a Thor comic, a nod to Branagh’s 2011 Marvel Comics film adaptation. 

In contrast to the threatening outside world — the extortionate threats of the frothing local anti-Catholic thug (Colin Morgan), or a Protestant minister’s hellfire sermon (based on the fanatical Ian Paisley?) - the family scenes are tender and protective.  

As Buddy’s father, Jamie Dornan (The Fall, Fifty Shades of Grey) and mother, Irish actress Caitríona Marie Belfry (the TV series Outlander) are, to use an Irish-ism, too feckin’ gorgeous. But they’re also estimable actors in scenes brought down to earth by their quarrels about finances and her reluctance to shed community and family to go “over the waters.”

The grandparents, too, are exemplary figures, crinkly, wise and beguiling:  Dame Judi Dench is a salty, movie-loving grandma, and Ciarán Hinds, in the movie’s most  winning performance, is the ailing grandpa, who enjoys his morning smoke in the backyard outhouse and is Buddy’s favourite confidante. 

After proceeding through the childhood epiphanies and observed details, Branagh’s memory  journey stumbles in  the last act as he attempts to elevate the material into scenes of climactic magical realism. 

Certainly, one can understand the urge to romanticize one’s parents of a half-century ago as glamorous lovers in a Hollywood musical, or elevate one’s father as the hero of a Western show-down. But Branagh’s ending feels less a dramatic resolution than, perhaps appropriately, an escape strategy.

Belfast. Written and directed by Kenneth Branagh. With Catriona Balfe, Judi Dench, Jamie Dornan, Ciarån Hinds, Colin Morgan, Jude Hill.  Belfast is available in theatres on Nov. 12.