Belfast

Rating

Director

Kenneth Branagh

Screenplay

Kenneth Branagh

Length

1h 38m

Starring

Jude Hill, Lewis McAskie, Caitriona Balfe, Jamie Dornan, Judi Dench, Ciaran Hinds, Colin Morgan

MPAA Rating

PG-13

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Review

There’s something familiar about Belfast and it isn’t just the theme of coming of age in difficult times. There have been numerous such films throughout film history. It’s in how director Kenneth Branagh frames the everyday life and family connections of his protagonist that reminds the viewer of their own childhood. That bond draws the audience into its story and helps deepen that impact the film has on the observer.

For Buddy (Jude Hill), life is as simple as one could expect for a 9-year-old. He plays with his friends in the street until his mother calls him home, the word spreading from one parental observer to the next until he can gain word and begin rushing home. His days are fairly simple, watching Star Trek on television, going to the occasional movie or theatrical production, working hard to excel in school while potentially falling for a female classmate.

Yet, one particular day in 1968, Buddy is about to find out that living in a mixed neighborhood in Belfast, Northern Ireland, carries with it far more dangers and life lessons than he could have imagined. Where he lives, Catholics and Protestants live side by side in peace and symbiotic spirit, living in coexistence while the nation around them fights for dominance with the English Protestants seeking to bring the Irish Catholics to heel.

Branagh grew up in Belfast in the same time period in which the film is set, himself 9 years old in 1968. You can see the loving attention to detail of his coming of age experience infused in this film as it marks a clearly personal one for the filmmaker. The Troubles was a combative period for the people of Northern Ireland. Although the conflict was nominally religious in nature, some people in Northern Ireland wanted to leave the United Kingdom after forty years being separated from Ireland while others wanted the territory to remain within the larger nation. This conflict resulted in violent interactions between the people of Northern Ireland, sometimes spilling out into neighboring regions.

The viewer doesn’t have to have a knowledge of this historical period when watching Belfast, but having a basic grasp of the situation will certainly help explain the events that transpire in the film, namely Buddy’s parents (Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe) conflicting with each other over whether to stay in the home and neighborhood that has been kind to them or to move to a more peaceful location away from the rising tensions of the region. Buddy wants his life to say as it is and fears that the transition will take him away not just from the friends he has made over the years, but that it will separate him from his grandparents (Ciaran Hinds and Judi Dench) with whom he shares a strong familiar bond.

The film opens with the bland, overly familiar, folksy original song “Down to Joy” playing over several colorful images of the present day city of Belfast, a major port town most noted for its construction of the ill-fated HMS Titanic. That symbolic reference won’t immediately jump to mind with most who watch the film, but it’s apropos of the impeding conflict that finally spills over into Buddy’s otherwise peaceful existence. The last shred of color for some time is that of a mural celebrating the people and history of Belfast that adorns a wall over which the camera cranes into a black-and-white environment filled with children playing in the street and parents inaudibly sharing the various experiences of life with one another.

It’s from there that the film’s story unwinds. We are treated occasionally to bursts of color as the outside world offers its succor to Buddy and his family. We’re treated to images from films like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and even a stage version of A Christmas Carol. These moments take the audience briefly out of the black-and-white world in which they are inhabiting to experience what life must have been like for those who had seldom seen color programming, their black-and-white television at one point showing the filmed-in-color Star Trek as a visual expression of that limitation. We get a sense from these moments that the film wants us to feel how in-the-moment things were for these people and how the tumultuous political divides that were on the rise throughout the area could dampen their spirit, but not break it.

Hill is an amiable lead as Buddy, but the adults provide more capable performances as is usually expected. Dornan does his best work yet as the concerned father taken away from his family far too often to provide for their meager living. Balfe and Dench are better as the nerves-of-steel women in Buddy’s life who show him what confidence and compassion are like, thereby creating the kind of empathy-filled environment in which to raise a wonderful, strong, and conscientious adult. Hinds is best in the film delivering what may be his most accessible and emotional performance to date. While he doesn’t have nearly as much to do in the film as the audience would like, he takes time in each moment to dominate the scene in such a way that it feels natural and doesn’t overshadow his co-stars. It’s a compassionate and wizened performance that lasts long beyond its presence on screen.

Branagh’s film owes a great deal to numerous features of the past, most of it to John Ford’s Welsh-set, but Irish-in-spirit How Green Was My Valley. Like Ford’s film, this is a coming of age story about a working class family struggling against outside pressures. The key difference here is that in How Green Was My Valley, the family begins to splinter as the community’s battle lines are drawn. Here, in spite of outside tensions attempting to rip the family apart, their strength of character keeps them united.

As a coming of age story, Belfast excels. While the turmoil surrounding the family creates extreme pressure, the loving home and their compassionate concern for one another help to strengthen their bond in the face of adversity rather than to weaken it. Like it’s ordinary opening song, the style is unnecessarily familiar. As a slice of life drama, there isn’t much here we haven’t seen countless times before and the exterior influences provide a nice environment in which to tell the story, but the end result is something that doesn’t feel as consequential as it should.

Belfast is a well meaning film that is lovely to look at and experience, but ultimately it never digs deep enough. It’s a slice of life that lingers for a bit, but slowly fades from memory. That isn’t from a lack of impressionable characters, the film has those in spades. What the film doesn’t do is endure. Some will likely remember much of its content with vivid clarity, but others will be impressed for a short time and then as the decades pass, it will blend with all the others of its kind and diminish to the point of inconsequence. It’s a pity for a film with such noble aspirations.

Oscar Prospects

Guarantees: Picture, Original Screenplay, Cinematography
Probables: Directing, Supporting Actor (Ciaran Hinds), Production Design, Costume Design
Potentials: Supporting Actor (Jamie Dornan), Supporting Actress (Caitriona Balfe), Original Score, Original Song (“Down to Joy”), Film Editing, Makeup & Hairstyling, Sound
Unlikelies: Actor (Jude Hill), Supporting Actress (Judi Dench)

Review Written

December 29, 2021