When hate took a back seat
A van isn’t a great vehicle for a drama on how old enemies ended the Troubles.
At the height of the St Andrews Agreement negotiations in 2006, Irish Republican leader Martin McGuinness (Colm Meaney) and Unionist firebrand Ian Paisley (Timothy Spall) shared an hour-long van ride across
the Scottish countryside – two men, united by mutual hatred, together alone for the first time.
The trip really did happen, though no one knows what was said, so The Journey hypothesises bitter arguments about the legacy of the civil war, the tactics of the IRA and Paisley’s militias, the pervasiveness of guilt.
The idea is a good one and might have made for an involved and crackling twoman stage play. But as a film, The Journey always reaches for the most reductive and condensed version of history. Mentions of Bloody Sunday and the Enniskillen bombings stand in for 80 years of conflict. And in a bid to make proceedings more cinematic, director Nick Hamm constantly cuts back to a cast of famous faces – Gerry Adams, Bertie Ahern, Tony Blair – watching on through the van’s secret cameras, sighing and cheering as if they were at a football match. These interruptions to
Meaney and Spall’s dialogue render any drama inert and stunted.
A strange fog hangs over the film too. As of the time of writing, the apparatus that McGuinness and Paisley helped build, including the Good Friday Agreement, on which a quarter-century of semi-peace has been built, is being threatened by an existential tangle.
The Democratic Unionist Party, which Paisley founded, is propping up a Conservative minority in Westminster, even though the power-sharing Northern Irish assembly has collapsed because of a financial scandal overseen by the DUP’s current leader. None of this, of course, could have been foreseen by The Journey’s makers, but current events only reinforce the film as an odd and imprecise relic. IN CINEMAS NOW