Ken Loach (2014)

Who can forget Jim Norton as the scary Bishop Brennan in Father Ted?  Ken Loach, evidently.  I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the trailer for Jimmy’s Hall and Norton, quivering with outraged bigotry, inveighing from the pulpit against the ‘antichrists’ who are the main characters, and the heroes, of the film.  How can the audience take this character seriously, given who’s playing him?  In the event, Norton’s very skilful performance is one of the (few) real strengths of Jimmy’s Hall; and, to be fair to Loach and his usual screenwriter Paul Laverty (working from a play by Donal O’Kelly), the character of Father Sheridan is more divided than you’d expect from the trailer.  He’s perhaps as complex as anyone in the story or, at least, Jim Norton makes him seem that way.  You still wonder, though, if Ken Loach shares with this priest (and with Bishop Brennan) the lack of a sense of humour.  Maybe it’s just that, as a seventy-eight-year-old British socialist, Loach thinks there’s not much to laugh about these days.

This film is ‘inspired by the life and times of Jimmy Gralton’, an Irish communist whose opening of a folk hall in Country Leitrim in 1922 proved so politically incendiary – to the Catholic Church and landowners sympathetic to the new Provisional Government – that Gralton took a boat across the Atlantic and lived in New York until things had ‘calmed down a bit’.  (It’s not explained what exactly he did in New York beyond, as he tells his friends on his return to Ireland, going to hear jazz in a club where black and white musicians played together.)  Jimmy and his mates put on various activities at the hall and also contributed to the upkeep of the place.  The activities included singing, dancing, boxing, art classes and poetry appreciation sessions, aimed primarily at the local youth.  Ken Loach is less clear as to whether and, if so, how much explicit political teaching goes on there.  In 1932, Jimmy’s brother has died.  He goes back to Ireland to care for his elderly mother and help with the running of the small, mean family farm.  But the youngsters of the place, still starved of opportunities to enjoy themselves or stimulate their minds, know Jimmy’s reputation and beg him to start the hall up again.  He refuses at first but a visit to the place, deserted but with books still in situ so that he can blow dust and get a flashback from them, changes his mind.

The hall re-opens with its former programme of activities (plus jazz records) and it prospers.  The Church and the Free Staters excoriate Jimmy’s group as ‘atheists and communists’ but (as I understood it) are less well placed than they were ten years earlier to put a quick end to what goes on in the hall.  (As the opening legends explain, the Irish government had changed in early 1932.  The first Fianna Fáil administration, headed by de Valera, was now in office.)  It’s when Jimmy’s group gets involved in a political campaign against the eviction of a farm worker and his family from a landowner’s estate that things get really nasty.  The hall is burned down; the law comes to arrest Jimmy, with a warrant for his arrest signed by the Irish Minister of Justice.  His mother outwits the police and Jimmy goes on the run but he’s eventually run to earth and forced into a second transatlantic exile, this time as a deportee.   (Jimmy Gralton remains the only Irishman ever to have been so deported.  He never returned to Ireland and died in New York in 1945, aged fifty-nine.)  As he’s driven away, the youngsters who begged him to re-open the hall gather again to cheer Jimmy and jeer the police.  The camera freezes on their animated young faces.

Is this final shot (and rumour has it that Jimmy’s Hall may be Loach’s last film) meant to be an image of hope or one of elegy for hope that died – hope which I assume Ken Loach would see as thwarted by the same forces in Ireland that did for Jimmy Gralton’s political idealism?   Were these young people, as they got older, worn down into the religious conformism of their parents and grandparents?  At one point, Loach shows a recording of the visit to Ireland in 1932 of the Papal Legate, Cardinal Lorenzo Lauri.  Jimmy and his friends watch it in a cinema.  Some other members of the audience there applaud the Pathé News footage, which shows huge crowds attending the acts of public worship over which the Papal Legate presides.  It’s this kind of evidence of mass religious enthusiasm that allows Father Sheridan to insist to Jimmy that Ireland is a spiritually unified nation with a common set of values that only a tiny minority is determined to undermine.  Even Sheridan’s sidekick, the younger, more liberal Father Seamus, reckons, when Sheridan first expresses concern about the hall re-opening, there are ‘no more than twenty or thirty communists in the country’ and that Gralton is a ‘lightweight maverick’, best ignored.  But the combination of Ken Loach’s humanism and his division of characters into goodies and baddies contradicts Seamus’s estimate and the Pathé News evidence.  You’d think, from what you see on screen, that a handful of priests and landowners-cum-political fanatics are out to suppress the natural wishes of the vast majority of the people of County Leitrim.

Loach and Paul Laverty address only briefly how conflicted the locals are.  One woman, frightened and weeping, tells how Father Sheridan has threatened to promote a boycott of the shop that she and her husband run, unless she stops her work at the hall.  Otherwise, I didn’t understand what was in the minds of those who run the place but are also part of the priest’s congregation:  they can’t all be in church on sufferance or under pressure from others.  I wasn’t clear either how it took so long for Jimmy’s enemies to get wind of what was happening at the hall.  For all his visits to parishioners for tea and scones, the first that Sheridan appears to know is when he reads an article in the paper about a grand reopening scheduled for the coming weekend.

This is the kind of detail that Loach and Laverty have no time for but the film is slippery in larger ways too.  The hall, a model of what community will and team spirit can bring about, aspires to provide the local people, especially its youth, with cultural enlightenment and fun.  The hall’s antagonists are presented as benighted fascist spoilsports but as Ryan Gilbey pointed out in the New Statesman:

‘Even the violent raids on the hall are staged with a curious sentimentality. The police are always bursting in during Gaelic singing lessons or dancing classes to slap women to the ground. They never seem to call when the boxing is in full swing.’

Let alone when political views are being expounded – there being very scarce evidence that they are.  The conclusive arson attack on the hall occurs, however, after Jimmy et al have publicly espoused a political position.  I appreciate that Ken Loach regards the group’s social aims and political activism as equally admirable but it’s manipulative film-making of a not very high order to concentrate exclusively on the former in order to keep the audience on side. Loach’s approach is obvious from the opening credits.  These comprise a montage of news film clips of life in New York in the 1920s, fascinating in themselves but deadening in the poor-folk-are-good-but-capitalism-is-bad message they emphatically convey.  After a couple of clips of working class solidarity and African-Americans dancing in the street, Loach cuts to the Wall Street Crash and desolating images of life and death in the Depression.

It’s true that there’s much debate among the member of the hall committee as to whether they should get politically involved in the way they do although I wished, as each person expressed her or his view, that one or two could be relatively less articulate – or differently articulate.  Ken Loach shows a tendency, whenever there’s a sequence of characters with a few lines each, to eschew overlapping dialogue; and the effect is more artificial than it would be if the rest of the acting were not so persuasively naturalistic.  There are some very good performances in addition to Jim Norton’s, particularly Aileen Henry’s as Jimmy’s mother, a woman who was bringing education to the community in a different way years earlier when she ran a mobile library (and thereby attracting some suspicion on the part of the Church).  Aileen Henry, in what is her first screen role, conveys easily but incisively a combination of sensitivity and shrewd determination:  Mrs Gralton can appreciate a nice reading of a Yeats poem; she’s also an utterly loyal, quietly dominating mother, not above the use of low cunning to keep the local police off Jimmy’s back.  (The characterisation of the eejit Gardai here struck me as borderline racial stereotyping.)

Simone Murphy, as the love of Jimmy’s life, Oona, has a look of the young Susan Sarandon and, although the part is poorly written, Murphy is affecting in it.   One of the more thoughtful touches in the film is the pale but noticeable scar that Oona has above her right eye in 1932, the legacy of the attack on the hall a decade earlier.  (Oona is a fictional character, the girl Jimmy had to leave behind when he went to New York the first time and who, when he returns, is married with children – trapped in a family situation different from the one that kept her in Ireland in 1922, when she was caring for her father.)  The incredibly pretty Aisling Franciosi is vivid as the rebellious daughter of the chief Free Stater villain (Brian C O’Byrne).  As Jimmy, the handsome Barry Ward is not greatly charismatic but his understated playing of the role is increasingly welcome, given how it’s conceived in the script.  As Father Seamus, Andrew Scott is excellent in his early scenes with Jim Norton but the character is forced into too melodramatic a volte face and condemnation of what eventually happens to the hall.   Robbie Ryan’s cinematography and George Fenton’s music reinforce the romantic sentimentality of the film, in both cases more subtly than some of its other elements.

2 June 2014