Courtesy Northern Ireland Screen
We can call it now that a good chunk of the audience won’t go for Belfast. Kenneth Branagh’s newest is far too wholesome for those who like their cinema dark, an insufferably long monologue about universal life truths. For those very reasons, however, it will surely be adored in other circles.
As The Troubles take off in Northern Ireland in 1969, young Buddy (Jude Hill) is far more interested in his school crush than he is in the increasingly-frequent riots which, from the film’s get-go, go down in his neighborhood. The religious lines are drawn, and Buddy’s parents (a powerful Caitríona Balfe and a strong Jamie Dornan) debate whether to travel abroad to protect their family from the chaos, or to keep them in the world they know.
Belfast comes with a number of irks. Its visual language isn’t coherent, there’s entirely too much reliance on late-1960s tunes to set the mood and the melodrama feels bloated. It scores in the deeper questions it raises, though, namely, how to raise a morally upright family when everyone else is willing to blow someone’s head off—or at least considering that. Seeing civil unrest from a child’s perspective brings a different kind of richness to the experience, especially as Buddy relates to the violence through his only known source of the stuff—American Westerns. Sadly, that also means certain complexities get lost in the shuffle.
For those who respond to more philosophic styles, Belfast will likely seem a deeply moving remembrance from one who was there. Even so, it is too limited in scope to be considered an epic, and far more a memoir from Branagh’s own childhood experiences as a Belfast native. This can make the storytelling feel a bit too dependent on Branagh’s recollections to fully dedicate itself to deeper concepts, thus Belfast lingers in a confused and confusing state between the sweet romanticism of the past and the realities of the historic epoch in which it’s embedded. No, Branagh’s opus might not rank amongst the cinema greats or contempo-classics, but it’s a shoo-in as the year’s tearjerking awards-contender and the kind of film that could unfurl more meaning upon further viewings. Still, the imperfect introduction gets the job done.
7
+ Deeply personal and often moving
- Mid-point sag; misguided creative choices
Belfast
Directed by Branagh
With Balfe, Dornan, Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds
Violet Crown, NR, 97 min
