James Marsh (2012)
Collette McVeigh, a Northern Irish Catholic aged about thirty, works for the IRA. In 1993, she leaves a bomb in a bag at a London underground station, is apprehended by MI5 and offered the choice of a long jail sentence or becoming an informant. Collette can’t face the prospect of being separated from her young son. She reluctantly agrees to work for the British – spying on her colleagues, including members of her own family, back in Belfast. James Marsh’s second non-fiction feature (after The King in 2005) holds your attention. Most of the performances and some of Marsh’s direction are good enough to create an illusion of depth. The actors not only fill out their characters. Because it’s often hard to hear what they’re saying they also create a feeling that you may be missing something important and must listen carefully. But the script by Tom Bradby, based on his 1998 novel, turns out to be thin. The people in Shadow Dancer remain interesting only because they’re opaque and, as a result, tantalising. The film dwindles into a who’s-double-crossing-who political thriller which, in spite of its superficially specific context, is generic.
In a 1970s prologue, Collette’s younger brother is shot dead in a street near the family’s Belfast home. Their Republican allegiances and Collette’s subsequent terrorist activities are thus explained. The London tube train on which Collette travels to deposit the explosive device she’s carrying (at what looks like Mile End station) is too modern for 1993 but the film’s production design, by Jon Henson, is largely convincing. In view of James Marsh’s film-making CV, it’s not surprising that he delivers some strong, quasi-documentary sequences. He shows a less predictable tendency to frame characters pictorially, especially Andrea Riseborough’s Collette. Marsh and Tom Bradby use the setting of the Troubles as if to confer depth but the story they tell – describing tensions, suspicions and manoeuvrings for position within both MI5 and the IRA – isn’t essentially different from what you’d expect in, say, a cops vs Mafia movie. There’s nothing to make the characters’ divided loyalties distinctive and specific at the level that Neil Jordan achieved, through the relationship between the British soldier and his IRA captor (and the legacy of that relationship), in The Crying Game.
I didn’t understand why MI5, when they’ve turned Collette but allow her to carry on with her ‘normal’ life in Belfast, were content for CCTV footage of her, on the London underground, to be shown on national television. What would have happened if someone had recognised her as the figure on CCTV and gone to the police? And Collette is rather a striking figure. Andrea Riseborough, almost ghostly pale, certainly holds the camera; there are times when you think she’s withholding expression but you then realise how much is going on in her eyes. The character of Mac, her MI5 handler, has no backstory. Clive Owen engages you by combining matter-of-fact underplaying with his naturally strong screen presence. As his boss, Gillian Anderson stands out in this cast in the wrong way. She earns full marks for speaking audibly: unfortunately, this exposes both the mediocre dialogue and Anderson’s artificial acting. In other supporting roles, David Wilmot is particularly convincing as an IRA man and there’s good work from Brid Brennan (Collette’s mother), Domhnall Gleeson and Aiden Gillen (her brothers).
31 March 2015
