Belfast. Directed and written by Kenneth Branagh, performances by Jude Hill, Caitríona Balfe, and Jamie Dornan, TKBC, 2021.
I believe we have only done only one other film review on these pages. We normally do literary reviews, but Belfast is a very literate film. It also spoke to the life experience of the reviewer. Do not miss it.
Belfast is one of the best films I have seen in a long time. It is not mere entertainment, though it is entertaining. It is speaking to us today.
The film focuses on nine-year-old Buddy in a working class street of row houses—a mixed Catholic and Protestant neighborhood—beginning in 1969. It brought back many personal memories of division, of joy, of hope.
I lived in a working class neighborhood just outside of Pittsburgh until I was eleven. Like Branagh, I was a baby boomer, so the streets and playgrounds were full of kids, and everyone pretty much knew everyone else. I am ten years older than Branagh, but the scene had not changed that much.
Just as Buddy’s family moved to England and a better job for his father when he was ten, so my family moved to New England to an upscale middle class town in New England when I was eleven. Based on Branagh’s own experiences, he says he still has some of Belfast in him. So I still have Pittsburgh in me.
Like Buddy in the film, I admired my paternal grandfather. He died less than two years after we moved, not unlike Buddy’s experience. Like Buddy, I did not want to move. I had my friends. In the long run, though, I made new friends and adjusted as kids do.
The biggest difference in the new place, as it may have been for Buddy, was that no one knew my family. In Pennsylvania my father was active in politics and respected and known by many people. Buddy’s father was not involved in politics, but everyone knew the family.
Because it is set in 1969, Belfast shows us the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Rioters on Buddy’s street attack the homes of the Catholics. They are led by a young man who is seeking to legitimize his hoodlum tendencies. Buddy’s Protestant parents reject that militancy. Even his widowed grandmother encourages them to move when his father is given the opportunity.
For me, 1969 was also a year of riots and protest. Though not quite as violent as Northern Ireland, the antiwar and pro-Communist movements were quite active. I worked in Detroit for a while that year and heard stories from both black and white people about he National Guard occupation during riots there in 1967. By 1969, though, most people there on both sides had some mistrust but were looking for reconciliation.
Not so back on campus where the radicals were hoping to start a revolution. The revolution ultimately failed then, but it would set the tone in academia where we see the fruits of class and racial division and intolerance. As in 1969 there have been riots and looting in recent years. In both the United States and Northern Ireland in 1969, the political protest was often joined or taken advantage of by criminal types.
In 1969 student radicals at my college took over the administration building. They were forcibly removed less than two days later by the state police. While about sixty percent of the student body back then was on some kind of financial aid, only one of the 110 students arrested had any kind of aid, and that was a $500 loan. In other words, these were the spoiled brats, the elitists, the one percenters.
Some years later, I got to know one of those office occupiers. He never graduated because of drug use. He died in his early thirties. Drugs took down a number of people in our generation.
The two young men who most considered the leaders of the protest had careers which today typify two radical institutions. One became a college professor. The other one became a film actor in Hollywood. Political radicals in universities and movies? Imagine that!
The following year, after a large protest in downtown Boston, some of the protestors came to Harvard Square and began breaking windows and truly rioting. I got caught in the middle of another street riot when I was simply trying to return to my dormitory.
In both cases there was actual fighting with the police who used tear gas. An acquaintance who was sympathetic to the radicals said these rioters were hoodlums—like the neighborhood ringleader in Belfast. They reminded him of the guys in his urban high school who hung out at the boys’ rooms to shake down students for their lunch money.
Buddy gets swept up with some looters, and his mother comes in the middle of the rioters and soldiers to take him home. That reminded me of the iconic photo from a few years ago where the mother of a looter in Baltimore was pulling her son by the ear to take him home.
Throughout all this unrest, though, there was family love and neighborhood solidarity. His parents had some financial problems—apparently due to back taxes and gambling—and we could see a potential breakup. But ultimately they stuck it out together as the grandparents had, and so Buddy tries to maintain things with a cute Catholic classmate he has a crush on.
Today I still have a number of good friends I made in college. I know we have a variety of views on politics and religion. But we still respect each other and are still friends. I cherish these relationships. Ultimately, so does Buddy and his family.
Buddy’s school seating was according to the “head of the class” system. Those with good grades got to sit closer to the front. I heard about that from my grandparents, but it was rare in American schools by the 1950s. Still, teachers were pretty strict about learning and behavior. A couple of my teachers would post the rank of different work we did on bulletin boards.
Though set over fifty years ago, Belfast speaks today. Buddy liked movies. We see clips on the television from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and High Noon. In 1969 Belfast streets and some American campuses were not unlike the American Wild West.
There were also some clips from popular films in the late 1960s to remind us of what was going on in the culture. Buddy’s whole family enjoyed Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, whose author also wrote the James Bond tales. Buddy’s mother is not sure that Raquel Welch’s animal skin bikini in One Million Years B.C. is appropriate for young Buddy to see, but his grandfather, who loved the movies, assured her that the material about prehistoric dinosaurs was educational.
At one point, Buddy is reading a Thor comic. I was reading Thor comics in 1969 and went to hear Stan Lee speak when he came to our campus. I was older, but I could see that the psychological conflicts in the Marvel comics made them more interesting than other superhero magazines back then.
We could also interpret that as a shameless plug by Kenneth Branagh the same way Hamlet‘s references to Julius Caesar have been seen as Shakespeare shilling another of his stories. Branagh directed the 2011 Thor film.
The framing, the action, the expressions, even the costumes are very effective. The film is exquisitely shot—mostly in black and white but with purposeful use of color. The acting is solid, and Buddy is an innocent and believable kid who loves people.
Besides the joy in the family enduring the Troubles, there is joy in the sound track. Much of the movie is accompanied by songs by Van Morrison, the most famous pop artist from Northern Ireland. At times I wanted to get up and dance.
The accompaniment is very appropriate. It starts with a song written for the movie by Morrison called “Down to Joy.” That title is a theme of the tale, joy in spite of the Troubles. But more significantly even, it ends with “And the Healing Has Begun.”
We see the beginning of healing within Buddy’s family. Eventually, there was healing after the Troubles. So we see Belfast today the way Charles Dickens saw Paris after the Terror:
I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from the abyss, and in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation of itself and wearing out.
So, Lord, may the healing of our present troubles begin.