Kenneth Branagh revisits the troubles (and Troubles) of his youth in the oddly remote Belfast
Why is the most personal movie of the filmmaker’s career so impersonally directed?
Film Reviews Kenneth Branagh
Kenneth Branagh says it took him 50 years to find the right dramatic angle on the events of his childhood in Northern Ireland circa the late 1960s. Watching Belfast, the modestly scaled, monochromatic movie he’s made about that turbulent period of his own life and the country’s, you can’t help but wonder if he waited too long. This may, in content, be the most “personal” film in the up-and-down career of the classically trained stage and screen veteran. But however autobiographical the material, Branagh approaches it from a curious remove: He’s made a memoir that’s tenderly nostalgic in the broad strokes without ever locking the audience into an emotional perspective. It’s like paging through a photo album of your youth and struggling to conjure any specific feelings about the images, even the ones you’re in.
The film opens on the morning of August 15, 1969. To Americans, that date marks the beginning of a major cultural event, Woodstock. Across the pond, it’s remembered as the start of something less celebratory or unifying: the moment “the troubles” came to Belfast, engulfing the capital city of Northern Ireland in violent conflict. Branagh sets an idyllic scene, sweeping his camera over a bustling stretch of town in a single, extended take, children laughing and playing in the streets. And then a car explodes, and in floods an armed mob of loyalists and rioters, shattering the peace and innocence of the quaint, idealized Belfast the filmmaker has plucked from his memories.
Nine-year-old Buddy (Jude Hill) is there to witness history in the making. He is Branagh’s adolescent proxy and the film’s intersection point of the personal and the political. Buddy, the youngest of two sons, comes from a Protestant family, but his parents have no interest in fighting with the Catholics. His father (Jamie Dornan), who leaves the boys in the loving but sometimes exasperated care of their mother (Caitriona Balfe) while he’s away on business in London, resists the increasingly threatening with-us-or-against-us entreaties of Belfast’s loyalist contingent. If the film has a political conscience, it’s his almost relaxed “Can we all get along?” philosophy.
Belfast moves at a ramble. It keeps the encroaching chaos of the troubles mostly in the background; showdowns in the street and ransacking of local businesses are granted no more significance than Buddy’s nagging crush on a Catholic classmate—a choice that shrewdly acknowledges the way that headline news of the adult world can disappear into the tapestry of a child’s day-to-day, eclipsed by minor playground melodramas.
For advice, the boy turns to his grandparents, played by Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench, both visibly liberated by the opportunity to go small and ordinary, to portray founts of working-class wisdom. Branagh, famed enthusiast of the Bard, remains an ace with his actors. In Balfe, he locates both a toughness and a glamour (the latter shining brightest during a night of dancing and revelry that recalls another black-and-white collision of familial and national history, Cold War). And Dornan exudes the humane decency we all want to see in our fathers; between this and his against-type comic work in Barb And Star, the one-time Christian Grey is having a good year. Everyone seems at once grounded and a little larger than life—the right approach for how we remember the figures that loom over our formative years.
Is this Branagh’s Roma? It shares with that Oscar winner a certain rigor of cinematographic design, but it doesn’t exactly immerse us in its time period or the writer-director’s memories of it. Branagh, who never met an angle he couldn’t cant, films even the most intimate conversations from eccentric vantages—ballasting his actors with vast expanses of negative space or oddly blocking them in separate quadrants of the screen. It’s a restless, fussy shooting strategy that occasionally flirts with justification; one could rationalize all the voyeuristic shots through windows and doors as a representation of how children eavesdrop on adult drama. Just as often, though, it’s merely distracting—in part because there’s no consistent sense of point of view behind Branagh’s unusual framing.
Only when detouring into Buddy’s burgeoning preoccupations does Belfast threaten to actually adopt the boy’s outlook, to close the distance between us and the way Branagh might have seen the world at that age. Trips to both varieties of theater become intrusions of color in this velvety B&W world, the actors on stage or screen granted a full palette to suggest the way these Saturday matinees sparked Branagh’s developing imagination. (There’s also a shot of Buddy reading an issue of Thor—a rejoinder to any assumptions that his Marvel movie was strictly work-for-hire.) The music, on the other hand, seems only regionally specific: It’s basically wall-to-wall Van Morrison, a midtempo shortcut to mass nostalgia trips.
To its credit, Belfast is never egregiously sentimental: It’s just a little too off-kilter in staging—and a little too naturalistic in its scenes of domestic bliss and discord—to go full cutesy-poo in its depiction of a boy’s coming of age against the churn of history. The tradeoff, though, is that the film seems always on the outside looking in, stranded in some unaffecting dead zone between the growing pains of country and child. Branagh dedicates the movie to the survivors of Belfast, to those who left and those who stayed. Yet by the time Buddy’s family makes their own tough choice about which of these paths to follow, you realize that he’s never really connected us to the magic or even the reality of a place he’s reconstructed almost entirely on sets. The Belfast of his past and of his mind hasn’t made it to the screen intact.
35 Comments
Well, thanks for reminding me that I never got around to watching Roma, at any rate. I’ve never loved Branagh as a director, but this looks worth it for Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench, at least.
You have to watch his Henry V (1989). It’s brilliant. Not such a big fan of his Hamlet (1996).
Dead Again is a favorite of mine. The B&W sections are beautiful, making me think that his use of that technique in Belfast should be worth seeing.
I haven’t seen it in a while, but what I loved about Dead Again is that it is trash, impeccably tailored trash, totally worth the calories
I loved Dead Again, and Much Ado About Nothing.I also sat thru his Hamlet and found it very enjoyable. I’m glad Jamie Dornan is getting material that showcases his talent so that people forget about Fifty Shades of Blech.
BRIAN BLESSED is great in it as well. Here’s proof that BLESSED does indeed have an inside voice, and can pull of a compelling performance with one.
I will!
I just watched the trailer, and it looks beautiful.
It’s got Caitriona Balfe in it. So, yes, beautiful.
His Henry V ican watch multiple times. masterpiece
I think Ciaran Hinds is one of the greatest actors out there. I wish he’s get some meatier roles in stuff like this.
His Julius Caesar on Rome was fucking magnificent.“He was a CONSUL OF ROME!!!!”
One of the only series I own on Bluray. Looks fucking magnificent. Amazing cast as well.
The pundits on Twitter were gushing over this as a Best Picture lock, and for the life of me I can’t see why. Even if it’s not as sentimental as the trailers make it look, it feels so broad-strokes.
Poverty porn is all the rage.
You think sentimental broad-strokes movies don’t win Best Pictures?
It depends on how clothed the broads are and where they are being stroked. The Academy isn’t that big a fan of NC-17 films.
They are being stroked in the black-and-wite. Obvious Oscar bate.
They can, but they’ve been trending away from it in recent years, Green Book notwithstanding.
Forest Gump: “….what? Why are you looking at me?”
Green Book: “No idea, man.”
at the beginning of the otherwise pretty lame Spiral, Chris Rock has a fun short riff on Forrest Gump (worth watching the first ten minutes to see)
I can’t handle any of the Saw movies (I hate torture porn horror). Would you be so kind as to quote it for me?
this is only some of it, but maybe most of it, and you don’t have to watch the guy get his tongue cut out…honestly if the movie was just Chris Rock making jokes and robbing people it would have been much better…just doing his Reservoir Dogs. Also I can’t emphasize enough how far downhill the movie goes right after this sequence, it immediately turns into the “you’re a loose cannon!” “I get the job done!” scene with the chief and the rogue detective shouting every line at each other, it plays like a bad demo reel
The commercials are just overflowing with praise, and yet…nothing in the trailer really pulls at me. It all seems very generic. And I make a good effort to watch the major nominees and awards contenders every year, so it’s not like I’m the sort of viewer who would never go in for artsy movies or movies with a serious purpose. I really don’t think Belfast’s marketing is doing it any favors. I’ll probably see it eventually—when I get an awards screener passed on to me from my SAG-voter friend–but not before then.
Being emotionally distant is a key trait of, um….what are they called?
Joking aside, sectarian divisions need to dissolve. If one good thing can happen this decade while the US and the world burns, let it be peaceful Irish unification.
I must say the caliber of Irish actors on display are second to none. Branaughs work is all over the place but hey I’m willing to give it a shot.
It won the People’s Choice Award at TIFF, and that’s usually a good sign for a bunch of Oscar noms.
Dowd will spend the next few months trashing every movie other critics say might be an Oscar hopeful, won’t he?
Two ducks fly over Belfast. One says “Quack”. The other says “I’m goin’ as quack as I can!”I’ll see myself out.
You get 5 out of 10 Nadine Coyles!!
A duck walks into a pub in Ireland. The bartender says “What’s the quack?”
It looks like a good film, but I can’t say I’m incredibly familiar with Branagh beyond the Shakespeare stuff and Thor. If I like this, I’d have up start checking out his other efforts. Any recommendations?
Caitriona Balfe.
Oh wait so it’s about Ireland and it, for the first time in any film or tv series, addresses THE TROUBLES??? It took him this long to realize people are interested in Ireland because of THE TROUBLES??? That’s so on-brand “hit the world’s largest target somewhere” for Branagh.My question is: is this a lock for best picture or at least a nomination, because it seems to be a lock no matter if the movie itself is that good or not. It often seems like Oscar voters nominate based on the trailer.On “angle he couldn’t cant” lol: not sure if he said it recently but I recently read where he said Marvel had a fit over his canted angles in Thor and wanted to digitally uncant them (decant them?)