An event so horrifying it doesn’t need a bloodbath
BLACK 47 in truth is a Western, one that takes the crushing injustices of An Gorta Mór and drills them into the service of a revenge drama.
Martin Feeney (played by Australian James Frecheville with Zen-like inscrutability) is a Connaught Ranger who deserts and returns to Connemara from fighting a war in Afghanistan to find his village decimated by the potato famine. His mother’s grim little cottage has been ‘tumbled’ (the roof removed to make it uninhabitable) and she has died.
His brother has been hanged for shooting a bailiff. His sister and her daughter are eking out a miserable existence, and seem to be there only to give international audiences some insight into just how bad the conditions of the era actually were.
Played by Sarah Greene, she delivers what to Irish ears is the clunkiest line of dialogue in the movie. When the daughter asks what’s for dinner, she says: ‘Sorry, love, it’s only nettles.’ Honestly, you’d want to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
Without spoiling the drama, for understandable reasons Feeney finds himself at odds with the forces of the Crown: he is captured and held in a police station but, skilled in the ways of war, he massacres his guards, burns the police station and goes on the run to avenge his family by killing everyone who contributed to their deaths – the Irish police who operate against their own, the judge who sentences people to be hanged or transported to Australia for the pettiest of crimes, the land agents who do the bidding of their masters by evicting the wretched and leaving them to their inevitable fate.
Feeney even has a go at evangelical preachers demanding that the Irish accept the Anglicisation of their names (a Seamus Ó Súilleabháin is told he now is James Sullivan, in a scene that oddly reminded me of Kunta Kinte in Roots being told his new name was Toby) and reject their Catholicism in return for nourishment — hence the old expression ‘taking the soup’.
HERE, the movie seems to have been heavily influenced by Se7en, as each meets a fate determined by his prior actions. A weasly land agent who collaborated with the British is decapitated, and a pig’s head rested on his torso; a land owner still exporting food to Great Britain is smothered in a pile of grain, and so on.
Naturally, the authorities want Feeney tracked down and captured, so they enlist a policeman, and former army officer, called Hannah (the great Hugo Weaving in the film’s best performance).
The two fought together in Afghanistan, and Hannah knows Feeney’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s also a chance to redeem himself, as he faces the death penalty for killing a prisoner in custody.
Ironically, the British take that sort of thing seriously, but couldn’t care less about the wandering wretches and shrivelled corpses littering the countryside.
Hannah sets out with a British army officer, the pompous Captain Pope (Freddie Fox, embodying the complete indifference prevalent at the time) and the callow Private Hobson (Barry Keoghan).
Hobson gradually realises that he, as a working-class man, has more in common with the Irish than he does with his own officer class.
Aware that Feeney’s ultimate target will be Lord Kilmichael (Jim Broadbent), the uncaring landlord whose warmest wish is that someday ‘a Celtic Irishman will be as rare a sight as a red Indian in Manhattan’, they focus their efforts on protecting him.
In a clever scene, Kilmichael and translator and guide Conneely (the ubiquitous Stephen Rea) have a fireside chat that becomes emblematic of the relationship between the two islands.
When Kilmichael berates the Irish for not appreciating the scenery in Connemara, Conneely responds tartly: ‘Maybe people would place more value on beauty if they could eat it.’
It all comes to a head when Feeney, who increasingly ludicrously seems able to insert himself into any situation like a ghost, arrives for the final showdown, by now with a body count to his credit that would make Rambo look like an amateur.
This is what proves fatal for the film. Of course there were revenge attacks during the Famine, but none on this scale carried out by one man, and it is hard to suspend disbelief.
Director Lance Daly treats it all with a sparse style, ably abetted by Declan Quinn’s evocative cinematography.
Despite the fact they are poorly rendered, the CGI images of hillsides dotted with cottages do occasion a jolt of anger, as you realise just how sparsely Connemara is populated today, decimated by hundreds of thousands of deaths and the emigrant trail to the United States. Brian Byrne’s musical score is plaintive when necessary and rousing elsewhere, and adds greatly to the atmosphere.
Black 47 has been touted as an epic, but in truth it’s more intimate than that, and at its best when allowed to take an organic and logical direction, a welcome respite from some of the dialogue that presents history with about as much subtlety as a Connemara signpost.
It will do well, though. In recent years, our appetite for homemade movies telling our own stories has increased dramatically and, for many, Black 47 will revive an appropriate sense of outrage over an act of genocide, albeit one that was down to indifferent negligence rather than active extermination.
There’s no doubting it is exciting at times, and it always holds the interest, but unlike Feeney’s assassin skills, it never quite is as devastating an indictment as it wants to be.
That movie remains to be made.