Kari Skogland (2008)
The show that I saw at the Filmhouse was preceded by a BBC Northern Ireland documentary about Martin McGartland, on whose autobiography Kari Skogland’s picture is based. McGartland, a Catholic teenager, was recruited by the RUC in 1989 to provide information to their Special Branch about the Provisional IRA, of which he became a member (in the Provos’ Belfast Brigade). In 1991, McGartland was exposed as an informer; about to be tortured and murdered (the IRA’s standard treatment for informers), he escaped by jumping through an upstairs window. Seriously injured, he was taken by ambulance – and under RUC surveillance – to hospital. He subsequently relocated to England, to start a new life in hiding. The BBC documentary mainly comprises film of McGartland, seen in medium to long shot in his current place of occupation, and an interview with him. He’s filmed in shadow – you can make out his bespectacled profile but not his full features. This thirty-minute documentary was made in 1998, when McGartland, who had been frequently moved from one ‘safe’ place to another in England, was about to return to Northern Ireland to appear in a court case in which he was seeking compensation from the RUC. The judge threw out the case on the grounds that McGartland’s association with a terrorist organisation made him ineligible for compensation. The documentary ends rather confusingly with a legend on the screen, announcing that – but not explaining how – McGartland did actually receive compensation, a few weeks after the court case ended. We’re also told that McGartland remains in hiding.
Fifty Dead Men Walking begins in Canada in 1999 so that, if you’ve just seen the documentary, you’re immediately struck by how much further afield McGartland (Jim Sturgess) has had to go to be safe. He comes out of his house and looks under his car, checking for bombs. Moments later, a hooded sniper appears and shoots him through the car window. Skogland then cuts to Belfast in the late 1980s and, from that point on, the narrative is a straightforward description of McGartland’s life – as a street hustler before he embarks on his dual careers within the Belfast Brigade and working under cover for the RUC. He has a child and sets up house with a local Catholic girl Lara (Natalie Press). The climax of the film is McGartland’s escape from his IRA torturers and its immediate aftermath, before Skogland returns to the grievously injured man in the car in Canada. Text on the screen explains that he survived, what’s happened in the years since 1999, and that McGartland, who’s never seen his family since 1991, still lives in hiding. We’re told that it’s estimated that, through his work as an informer, McGartland saved the lives of up to 50 people – RUC officers, British soldiers and others. The film has a good title: ‘dead man walking’ is the call when a condemned man on death row is being brought through for execution. The phrase Fifty Dead Men Walking gets across both how close to death were the people whose were saved – and that they may still be around today.
This remarkable story is certainly worth telling and I’m glad the film’s been made but Fifty Dead Men is not much of a picture. We’re told at the beginning that some of the characters and events have been changed; if the information on Wikipedia is anything to go by, this is putting it mildly. For example, the 1999 shooting took place not in Canada but in Whitley Bay: the transposition seems a crude exaggeration of the impossibility for McGartland of being safe from his IRA pursuers. Kari Skogland, herself a Canadian, adapted the screenplay from McGartland’s autobiography (which was written with Nicholas Davies), as well as directing. She sets up the action in Belfast clumsily. It’s narrated at first by Fergus (Ben Kingsley), the Special Branch officer who recruited and ‘handled’ McGartland, as if the story is going to be told from Fergus’s point of view. In fact, the narration is used only to get across contextual information – how, for example, the Belfast jobs market was controlled by Protestants to the extent that many young Catholics were either unemployed or, like McGartland, got involved in selling dodgy goods or other kinds of petty crime – and is then dropped immediately.
Skogland seems to be looking for a semi-documentary feel to the look and movement of the film (shot by Jonathan Freeman and edited by Jim Munro) but it too often comes across like a conventional action thriller in not very convincing disguise. And because the visuals are hyperkinetic, Skogland never really evokes the horror of living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles by showing ordinary lives going on and terrorist violence literally exploding into them. The Belfast presented here is hellishly grim – the sulphurous yellow lighting of images is striking but looks contrived – and the violent anarchy seems merely intrinsic to the locale. One disadvantage of seeing the BBC documentary immediately beforehand was that the main events of McGartland’s career as an informer had already been described in that. As a result, Skogland’s film, which is short on dramatic and character development in any case, often seems to be doing little more than recording those events.
Perhaps because McGartland is actually a more controversial character than the film wants to present, Skogland doesn’t really get into exploring his motivation for the double life he came to lead. Jim Sturgess gets over the character’s street-smart cockiness and charm and is sometimes effective in the way he conceals his feelings from the Provos but a stronger director would have encouraged him to let the camera come to him instead of acting to the camera. As McGartland’s friend and IRA colleague, Kevin Zegers (who played Felicity Huffman’s son in Transamerica) is always poised between being a good mate and a homicide: often harder to read than Sturgess, Zegers registers more strongly. The Belfast accents are often difficult to decipher and this is one of several factors which makes Ben Kingsley – speaking in a completely intelligible northern English accent – too salient in the role of Fergus. Kingsley is already physically distinctive and magnetic, compared with everyone else we see: if his wig and clothes were supposed to make him look anonymous, they don’t succeed. He plays the part scrupulously but you can see him trying to act ordinary in a way that’s a little forced. Skogland’s screenplay doesn’t help by giving Fergus a tendency to speak in epigrams – ‘The price of a conscience is death’, ‘We uphold the law and we break the law – in the name of the law’, and so on. Some of the meetings between McGartland and Fergus look improbably public – especially when Fergus visits the hospital where McGartland’s baby son has just been born, and especially as the main purpose of his presence at the occasion seems to be for Fergus to tell McGartland and us about the toll his line of work has taken on his own family life. Still, the idea that Fergus, who’s estranged from his own son, has paternal feelings for McGartland comes over effectively enough. It’s nicely complemented too by the pride taken in McGartland by Mikey (Tom Collins), his IRA father figure.
12 April 2009
