Belfast

In Memory Yet Green (with Flecks of Orange)

or

"I'm Going Nowhere You Can't Find Me" ("All We Need to Survive is a Phone, a Pint, and the Sheet-Music to 'Danny Boy'")

 

Stevedores glow orange in an overcast dawn, looming over the port that shows no signs of life. They hover and oversee everything, reflected in warehouse windows and altering the horizon. They watch over the streets and houses—obvious signs of life as God never plans in straight lines. Then, we start to see walls with scrawls, graffiti decorating the barriers, making them their own or just making them a little less obtrusive, obstructive. 

 

Then the camera settles on a barricade with a collection of faces—dirty, bandaged, hatted—men-folk gathered, but whether they're coming home exhausted, or gathering with malice is a little hard to say. We move up the faces and over the wall, and it's like it's been protecting something. We see an alleyway filled with kids playing, kicking balls, playing knights, but they're in black-and-white. It's like the wall we flew over has scraped away the color, leaving the scene beyond in the bleached shades of a dream...or a memory.

Movies can have thesis statements embedded in them. The first image can be a summing up in some abstract way of what will come after. But, that opening sequence of Kenneth Branagh's Belfast (and, really, that's how it should be called) is as good a thesis as any I've seen. The city may be titular, but it's just bricks and mortar, water and fire, dirt and smoke, the frame. It's the people who make the memory—the city will always appear smaller than it did. But, the people will forever loom large.

August, 1969. Man has landed on the Moon. But, Earth is "the same old place." Buddy (Jude Hill) is a happy nine year old doing battle with a stick-sword and a garbage-lid shield, fighting dragons when he's called in for tea by his mother (Caitriona Balfe). He's having a good time, the street's busy with residents with their "halloo's" and banter so it's only natural that Buddy has a longer travel-time than what a bee-line home would normally take a human being. Just enough delay to get him in a fix. A gang of Protestants enter at the end of the mixed Protestant-Catholic street and start yelling for the Catholics to get out. First, they throw threats, then rocks, then molotov cocktails, then they roll a car with a burning rag in the gas intake.

And Buddy's in the midst of it. And like any nine year old not in charge he freezes, gaping at something new. What are they yelling at HIM for? He's Protestant! But, Ma sees him and, like a banshee, she grabs him, and the garbage can lid becomes a shield for reals as the rocks come flying and she takes her burden and herself back to the door they live behind and slam it and lock it and dive for the floor to avoid any flying glass. Play-time is over. A battle has come to Belfast and it's not an easy game of heroes and bad guys. It's too complicated for a child to understand. To say nothing of the adults.

Where's Da (Jamie Dornan)? He works in England during the week and comes home most often on weekends. So, the day-to-day is left to Ma—the bill-paying, the wondering where the money comes from, the avoiding the rent-man, the raising of Buddy and his older brother Will (Lewis McAskie)—and the making the peace when they've been "up to something" in the neighborhood, and when Da comes home there is the "adult talk" about things the kids don't understand or don't care about because they're so wrapped up in the "now."

Things like the newly-installed barbed wire (which becomes a foreground object through which Branagh shows life), the night patrols, the buzzing of helicopters, the increasing frailties of his parents (Ciaràn Hinds and Judi Dench, both photographed so you see ever seam earned in their faces) and that Da might have possibilities for a better paying, more steady job in England—but it would keep him away longer and he wants his family with him, if only the wife and kids didn't want to stay right where they are.

In the "now." Family is around them, there's a community—sure it's a "mixed" community, but the only ones making anything of it are the thugs and enforcers—there's school—with the cute girl in the class—and TV and movies...and home. The only home the kids have known and they're too young to know that "home" is as transmutable as the future. Or that "home" is changing right before their eyes. It's hard to see when one hasn't had much of a past.

Branagh's film is obviously made of love, living between nostalgia and fear, adult and child, and never completely resigning them into a fixed whole. One can forgive him for keening over into the precious—the "too-perfect" occasional shot, breaking the the use of color at movie images and stage productions (Branagh's dream-homes), and a confrontation scene that could have gone without its musical accompaniment (but we are talking about a child's eye view of it, so....myth?). But, forgive it, because despite its crisp photography, this is a film of filters and scrims of the mind, ultimately, not the HD precision of documentary. It's built of memory and bricks and stones and heart. And it relates to anybody oppressed, anybody in fear, and anybody who's been a child...or a parent. It's certainly the best film Branagh has made in years, and it's certainly among his personal best.

 

Fair play to him.