BRANAGH MINES CHILDHOOD MEMORIES IN ‘BELFAST’
Everyone has a story from childhood that remains vivid in memory, and that feels important enough to immortalize in art. But few people have the ability to get their story out from their minds and onto the page, the stage or the screen.
Yet when that does happen, and when it’s done right, you can get something original and heartfelt, such as Kenneth Branagh’s autobiographical “Belfast,” one of the glories of this year’s cinema.
Branagh grew up in a peculiar situation, something that would be hard to make up. In the time of the Troubles between Protestants and Catholics, when violence in Northern Ireland seemed inescapable and unending, Branagh’s family members were Protestants living in harmony with their Catholic neighbors in a Catholic neighborhood — one that was getting attacked by Protestants.
We begin in a black and white world that calls to mind the look of Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” and the famous “7 Up” documentary about 1960s British school children. Buddy (Jude Hill) is playing with friends, on a street that looks hardscrabble yet idyllic. Everyone knows each other. Everyone greets each other.
It’s just any other cheerful Friday afternoon, with kids playing and fathers coming home from work; except that Branagh tells us that it’s Aug. 15, 1969, and we know that date must mean something. What it means becomes apparent when young Buddy looks up the block and his expression changes. He freezes. Something unthinkable is seconds away from happening, and it will ultimately change his life forever.
A gang of Protestant thugs goes around smashing windows and attacking people. They blow up a car, and soon government tanks are rolling down the narrow street. Buddy’s family escapes without property damage, because the thugs know they are Protestant — that’s how specific and personal these attacks are. But the family suffers in other ways. Buddy’s father (Jamie Dornan), who has zero interest in this fight, is pressured to take sides and support the Protestant cause.
Basically, this is the family living at the epicenter of a civil war, and yet it’s fascinating, in retrospect, to realize that most of “Belfast” has nothing to do with the Troubles. Buddy likes a girl in his class.
He has a wonderful grandfather (played by Ciaran Hinds), a philosopher with an Irish gift of gab. He reads comic books, such as “Thor” (which Branagh would someday direct). And he discovers a love of movies, watching “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang ” with his family.
The possibility of violence never goes away. It hangs in the air and makes us savor every interlude of peace, every moment that gives us the texture of Northern Irish life. The Belfast of “Belfast” is a place of childhood enchantment and horror, a city to love and a city that must be escaped.
The acting is brilliant across the board, starting with Jude Hill, who really does seem like a nine-year-old Branagh and doesn’t have a false moment on screen. Branagh lavishes close-ups on his actors and gives them standout moments in his screenplay, as when Caitriona Balfe, as
Ma, goes into a long, impassioned speech about why the family mustn’t leave Belfast. The speech is all the more powerful because she’s dead wrong. Balfe is wellmatched by Jamie Dornan as Pa, who sees more than he says and carries himself with a grim awareness of how this all could end.
Judi Dench, as Granny, doesn’t loom quite as large in the story, but Branagh gives her a great moment worthy of her stature. He has her deliver a curtain line that brings the entire film together. Moreover, he uses Dench’s face in closeup, such that we come to believe that Grandma possesses — and has earned with every line on her face — the accumulated wisdom of Ireland.