Kenneth Branagh (2021)
Kenneth Branagh was born in Belfast in 1960 into a working-class Protestant family. Some of their immediate neighbours and friends were Catholics. Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ escalated in the summer of 1969; before he was ten years old, Branagh and his family had moved to England and set up house in Reading. In Belfast he dramatises the life of one particular working-class Protestant family – in a ‘mixed’ area, during the early months of the Troubles – and does so chiefly through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy. The family in the film eventually takes leave of their home city and sets off for a new life in England. Belfast is strongly autobiographical in more ways than one: it draws largely on the writer-director’s own experience and recalls this with feeling. The film is compact (97 minutes), straightforward, increasingly engaging and finally moving. It’s getting good reviews and awards nominations, doing well at the box office, and deserves the success that it’s enjoying.
Branagh’s alter ego is Buddy (Jude Hill), who lives with his parents, Ma (Caitríona Balfe) and Pa (Jamie Dornan), and elder brother, Will (Lewis McAskie). Their paternal grandparents, Granny (Judi Dench) and Pop (Ciarán Hinds), live a few doors away in the same terraced street. From the start, Pa is regularly commuting to and from London to work as a joiner and pay off the family’s debts. He’s the pragmatic voice urging his wife, more and more insistently, to make the move to England. At the outset, Buddy’s school class comprises Protestant and Catholic children. The latter include Catherine (Olive Tennant), the object of Buddy’s first crush and a scholastic high-flyer. The children change desks in the classroom according to their position in regular tests: this is one of many details in Belfast that older British viewers will find evocative. Others include the items plundered by Buddy, first in a cack-handed theft from a sweet shop, later in a mob’s looting of a supermarket. He owes his involvement in these crimes to a tough, bossy teenage girl called Moira (Lara McDonnell). She derides Buddy for stealing (Fry’s) Turkish Delight which, according to Moira, ‘nobody likes’ (I did!). Stimulated by the rival factions in the Troubles, Moira sets up her own little gang – ‘This is war!’, she declares as the supermarket raid begins. Buddy is instructed to take ‘whatever you need’ and goes home with a box of Omo, to Ma’s consternation. He protests that – as he knows from the TV commercial – ‘It’s biological!’ but Ma drags him and the Omo back to the supermarket.
What was previously presented as semi-comical lawbreaking now turns scary. Local thug and sectarian rabble-rouser Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan), who has repeatedly warned Pa that it’s time for Protestants to stand together against Catholics, takes Ma and Buddy hostage, as a means of making his own escape from the supermarket. British soldiers arrive to sort things out but not before a standoff with Billy, whom Pa and Will manage to disarm. Belfast can’t do without the civil unrest sequences that are obviously fundamental to the story but they’re problematic. When Buddy is caught up in the middle of street fighting, he’s naturally scared stiff but we get no sense of its subsequent or cumulative effects on him: these episodes of somewhat stylised violence are peculiarly self-contained. Branagh is much more comfortable with domestic settings and themes. Buddy isn’t in every frame. In scenes he doesn’t otherwise feature in, he’s often revealed on the margins, observing what’s been going on – a device that articulates his individual experience with Branagh’s larger portrait of a family. There’s nothing especially original in the description of tensions between Ma and Pa, over whether or not to stay in the community where they belong, or of Pop’s final illness, but both threads are involving and convincing.
Belfast is not a masterpiece and at its weakest when it tries to be – or, at least, tries to look like a work of art. The transition from opening colour shots of the harbour and cityscape of present-day Belfast to black-and-white cinematography for the main narrative is effective enough (the DP is Haris Zambarloukos). The flow of that narrative is interrupted, though, by images shot from surprising camera angles and distances. Their sole purpose seems to be eye-catching – a purpose achieved only too well; the director seems to pause to admire his compositions. Despite the reality of its inspiration, Belfast also tends to feel built up from other films that Branagh has seen. As well as going to the pictures with other family members, Buddy watches High Noon on television; a couple of subsequent shots of the street where he lives are designed to evoke the street in Fred Zinnemann’s film. They may be meant also to show Buddy connecting Gary Cooper’s honourable predicament with his own father’s but the shots come across merely as High Noon ‘references’. In several sequences, kids play in the street. Their clothes and hair look right yet they’re extras acting playing: Branagh can’t capture their movements in ways that might bring them fully to life. I was surprised at how few local shop fronts bore the proprietor’s name rather than just the shop’s line of business (confectioner, bookmaker, and so on). Perhaps that’s historically accurate but for this viewer it reinforced Belfast‘s sometimes artificial context.
It seems daft to praise the writer-director of an autobiographical film about close family for loving his characters but it’s still refreshing to see. Branagh loves his actors, too – especially Judi Dench. He’s determined to cast her come what may, most recently before Belfast as Anne Hathaway to his Shakespeare in All Is True (2018), despite the twenty-six-year difference in their ages. Although Dench was coming up eighty-six when Belfast was shot, the age gaps between her and the actors playing her husband and son isn’t really a problem. If it had been, Branagh would still have done the right thing putting Dench in the film: since she can’t go on forever, seize the day. What she achieves in Belfast has gone mostly unremarked in this season’s awards conversations: this can only be because people have got so used to her being magnificent they take it for granted now[1]. Just one example of how Dench creates yet another rich characterisation. As Granny and Pop reminisce, he jokes that he never could resist her once he saw her brown legs; they laugh as she recalls painting on stockings and having a hard job getting the ‘paint’ off. As she resumes doing a puzzle in her newspaper, Pop gets up and, as he does so, coughs. She glances at him while his back is turned, knowing what the cough may mean. She looks back to the newspaper but the world isn’t the same. This film is weakened by some fancy visuals but Branagh knows to keep the camera still when it’s on Judi Dench.
This doesn’t work so well when he’s gazing admiringly, as he does a couple of times, at Caitríona Balfe, and leaves her looking a bit actressy, compared with her great co-star. Tall, beautiful Balfe delivers a good performance, though. (Her height gives her real distinction: when Ma has her hair up, she’s taller than Pa; the mini-skirts show off her long legs spectacularly.) Ciarán Hinds isn’t a favourite of mine but the plaudits he’s getting for Belfast are merited: he’s particularly eloquent when Pop is in hospital. Even allowing that Buddy’s the hero, Branagh has underwritten the role of his elder brother: Lewis McCaskie has next to nothing to work with. Probably for similar reasons, Colin Morgan overdoes Billy Clanton’s bigoted menace. As Mackie, a neighbour, Gerard Horan is, as ever, excellent. The film also features John Sessions’ last appearance: a cameo of the Belfast stage actor Joseph Tomelty playing Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol, which the family goes to see at the theatre. (Sessions died suddenly on 2 November 2020, a matter of days after Branagh, his friend of many years’ standing, had completed the seven-week shoot on Belfast.)
Jude Hill’s extrovert, impulsive Buddy is completely winning. Next to him, the revelation in the cast is Jamie Dornan. He was, in every sense, the star of the recent TV mini-series The Tourist, his smart, seemingly shallow charisma just right for what was a flashy, knowing, very violent comedy thriller. Dornan is quite differently charismatic in Belfast. I was amazed by the modest but incisive portrait of Pa that he builds gradually and affectingly. There’s a lovely scene in which he plays ball with Buddy and some other kids in a local park, and Pa himself seems a boy again, doing something he’s been doing all his life. At the same time, Jamie Dornan is completely believable as someone now compelled to grow away from his home turf.
I’d seen the Belfast trailer several times and, because it features ‘Everlasting Love’, was looking forward to plenty more hit singles of the late 1960s. The soundtrack turns out to be disappointingly dominated by another famous son of Belfast, Van Morrison. His music is presumably important to Kenneth Branagh and Morrison was already a big name by 1969 but the songs are tonally ill matched with Buddy’s story. ‘Everlasting Love’ is worth waiting for, though. After Pop’s funeral, his family and friends gather in a bar. Granny chats cheerfully enough to the priest (Turlough Convery) who has just buried her husband. Pa sings ‘Everlasting Love’ to Ma; in response, she dances, laughing, and Pa then joins her. Buddy watches, thrilled to see his parents happily back in sync. Jamie Dornan’s voice (to the track of the Love Affair’s original) and Caitríona Balfe’s movement are a delight. The sequence isn’t realistic (this is too early for karaoke) yet it’s emotionally truthful. With the invaluable help of a great pop song, it’s one of the most exultant moments of the film year.
‘Bloody religion, that’s the problem’, according to Pa, and Branagh clearly concurs, though without pushing the message too hard. In his only appearance in the film before Pop’s funeral, Turlough Convery’s priest is almost spitting fire and brimstone from the pulpit in his fork-in-the-road rant, offering his congregation the choice of salvation and perdition. (We are shown the effect of this on Buddy, though it feels like a pinch from Stephen Dedalus’s reaction to the hellfire sermon in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.) Just before the family sets off for Belfast airport, Buddy, after paying a farewell call on Catherine, asks his father if they might have had a future together despite Catherine’s being Catholic. Pa’s reply to the effect that it doesn’t matter what she is (‘a practising Hindu, or a Southern Baptist or a Vegetarian Anti-Christ’) is funny but his tone is wistful.
Branagh’s closing dedications are comprehensive – ‘For the ones who stayed … for the ones who left… and for all those who were lost’ – but words he puts in the mouths of his two senior characters say more. In hospital, his grandfather tells Buddy not to worry about going to England – ‘Belfast will still be there when you get back’. This brings to mind the film’s opening shots of the modern city and makes you think Pop is only half right: Belfast will still be there but much Troubled and changed. At the end, as she watches her family leave, Granny is doughtily unsentimental: ‘Go’, she says, standing alone and, in effect, talking to herself, ‘Go now. Don’t look back’. It’s only once the bus has pulled out and she closes her front door behind her that she lets the struggle of containing her feelings show.
26 January 2022
[1] Afternote: At least Judi Dench has landed a surprise Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her work in Belfast (although, as usual, she won’t win).
