‘Belfast’ Review: Love in the Time of Troubles

[peekaboo]

Kenneth Branagh’s semi-autobiographical look at his childhood in a turbulent Northern Ireland is a stirring tribute to family ties

 

Kenneth Branagh revisits a turbulent stretch of his childhood in “Belfast.” The time is 1969, when he was 9 years old and the Troubles, the sectarian battles between Catholics and Protestants, were engulfing the peaceful life of his working-class family and neighborhood, along with the rest of Northern Ireland. There’s only one trouble with his semi-autobiographical account. It’s so polished—so spirited, funny and skillfully calibrated—that it could be taken for a while as a crowd-pleaser and not a lot more. Sign me up for the crowd, though. This is surely the most pleasing film I’ve seen so far this year, but also the most affecting.

An opening montage briefly shows the modern city that Belfast has become. Then the first shot, evoking the past in lustrous black-and-white, sets the stage—a single block of row houses in the neighborhood—and fills it with children playing gleeful war games. No doubt about which of them is the filmmaker’s alter ego. It’s Buddy, the towheaded kid with the wooden sword, garbage-can-cover shield and invincible grin. He’s played by Jude Hill, an endearing young actor with outsize ardor who’s resistible only during two or three moments when Mr. Branagh, understandably enchanted, dotes on him in close-ups that are a bit too close and a bit too long. (Haris Zambarloukos did the superb cinematography. The production was designed by Jim Clay. Van Morrison, another native of Northern Ireland, provided the powerful music.)

Those innocent games don’t last. Buddy and his family—they’re among the few Protestants in a Catholic neighborhood—are beset by threats and pressures on all sides. His Pa ( Jamie Dornan ) is a joiner but not a joiner, a skilled carpenter who refuses to take up arms in a Protestant militia that’s been formed in response to Catholic attacks. His Ma (Caitríona Balfe) has been saving part of what her husband earns from sporadic employment in England, but her efforts are doomed by mounting interest on back taxes. (Two great actors play smaller but memorable roles that define the delicate intimacy of this family’s life: Judi Dench as Granny and Ciarán Hinds as the grandfather Buddy calls Pop. Lewis McAskie is Will, Buddy’s older brother.) The stark reality is that war-torn Northern Ireland offers no prospect of jobs or peace in the foreseeable future, so the family must choose between staying connected to its shriveling roots or risking everything to start a new life elsewhere.

Many movies have turned on such a choice. Buddy’s terror of leaving the home he loves for a new one he can’t imagine—“the Irish are made for leaving,” an aunt tells his mother—may remind you of Margaret O’Brien’s Tootie in “Meet Me in St. Louis,” weeping about her family’s impending move to New York. (If she hadn’t wept so bitterly and Judy Garland’s Esther hadn’t sung to her little sister so sweetly, we wouldn’t still be hearing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” every year.)

Buddy’s efforts to understand the Troubles reminded me of Billy, the 10-year-old hero of John Boorman’s semi-autobiographical “Hope and Glory,” growing up in and around London during the Blitz in World War II. But Billy exulted in the bombings; he saw them as fireworks. Buddy is frightened by the hard-faced zealots on both sides of the civil war; he takes refuge in the warmth of the people who love him. His exultations are reserved for the times when his family, with him in tow, seeks its own refuge at the local cinema.

Jude Hill as Buddy and Jamie Dornan as Pa

Photo: Focus Features

“Belfast” celebrates the delight and solace that movies can bring. John Wayne turns up on one of the screens within the screen. So does Raquel Welch. That car in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” takes to the air, prompting popeyed astonishment from the whole family. Not only does Gary Cooper make an appearance in “High Noon,” but Mr. Branagh restages the climactic showdown in a scene of his own, accompanied by Tex Ritter’s booming rendition of the now-classic title song. It’s a sequence I disliked for what I thought to be its glib manipulativeness until I realized that the filmmaker was using its heightened, almost surreal style to express Buddy’s earnest and befuddled world view, which isn’t a view of the real world so much as an attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible events swirling around him with the decoder ring of movie conventions.

The film isn’t perfect. The polish develops smudges, what with murderous thugs running melodramatically every which way and Buddy suddenly being dragooned into militia service for the space of a few minutes by a cousin whose role is underwritten and whose motives are murky. What’s more, the accents can be a challenge for American ears, i.e. mine. But “Belfast” is Mr. Branagh’s love letter to his family, and seldom has a filmmaker given life to cherished memories with more tenderness or vivacity—a mother radiant and eventually resolute in Ms. Balfe’s gorgeous performance; a father taciturn and increasingly strong; a grandfather who seems to have failed at everything but being adored (Mr. Hinds has never been better, though that applies to many in the cast), and a grandmother who stays tuned to everyone else in the house without looking up from her knitting. (Be prepared to be breathtaken by an almost silent shot of Ms. Dench seen behind a pane of ribbed glass.)

And what of the family’s decision to stay or go? Let’s just say that if they hadn’t done what they decide to do, that bright-faced little boy probably wouldn’t have become the Kenneth Branagh who, in the fullness of a notable career, has brought us this lovely tale.