WHEN McGUINNESS MET PAISLEY

Beware dramas bearing history. They are vehicles of entertainment first, education a distant second if at all. The Journey, from Northern Irish director Nick Hamm and writer Colin Bateman, takes the historic 2006 meeting between former IRA member Martin McGuinness and Unionist party leader Ian Paisley, and “imagines that journey.” Does it ever! We don’t have first-hand accounts of the words spoken between the two men — Paisley died in 2014, McGuinness this year — but we know that they only got to talking on a private jet that had been chartered to take Paisley from the talks in Scotland back to Belfast for his 50th wedding anniversary. McGuinness came along to lesson the chance of an attack on the aircraft. Bateman’s screenplay crams the two men in a van for the trip to the airport, adds Freddie Highmore as their chatty driver, and then lets loose with improbable circumstances, including a run-in with a deer, a detour to a churchyard and a credit-card mishap at a filling station. It only works as well as it does thanks to the calibre of the actors. Timothy Spall uses his superhuman talent for harrumphing to get into the skin of Paisley, an 80-year-old loyalist and Protestant minister so entrenched in his beliefs he once referred to the Pope as the Antichrist. And Colm Meaney brings a touch too much twinkle but is otherwise excellent as McGuinness, a Sinn Fein politician and former IRA member 25 years’ Paisley’s junior. In real life, the men would eventually be dubbed “the chuckle brothers” by the media for their rapport. In The Journey, they start off in uneasy silence, until McGuinness tries lightening the mood with humour. When Paisley refuses to let him borrow his cellphone, he grumbles: “A text is not going to kill you — unless it’s an order.” Zing! Eventually, Paisley tries his own one-liners, which are as old as the hills and a little less funny. (He claims he met his wife after she was the only one to laugh at his joke about the Irish-built Titanic being “all right when she left here.”) There’s a fun bit when they imagine famous moments in history if the participants spoke like the Irish: “That’s one small step for a man, so it is.” “I have a dream, so I have.” (For even more chuckles, with more food and less politics, check out Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in The Trip to Spain this summer.) The film was shot in Northern Ireland, its rolling greenery standing in easily for similar Scottish landscapes. Offering some variety in setting (if adding nothing to the narrative), the film occasionally cuts back to a control room where prime minister Tony Blair (Toby Stephens), and an MI5 operative (John Hurt in one of his final screen roles), keep tabs on the action. There is still a need for a comprehensive doc about the St. Andrews Agreement and its place in the Irish peace process. The Journey is a fine, fun fictional version, so it is. Just don’t confuse it with history.