Belfast is a wonderful film. It is full of wonder. It’s the best film Kenneth Branagh has made.
I admitted to a friend recently that I sometimes struggle with awards season movies. It’s a weakness in me, a contrariness. When a film is deemed ‘worthy’ by the great and the good, it can be a turn-off, even when friends agree, even when everyone tells you you should see it. I don’t think I’m alone. Frankly, if you feel like that, Belfast won’t be top of your list.
So why did I go? Well, another admission, in this case, I am wildly biased. I’m proud to have Irish roots, and I lived just outside Belfast when I was younger for a time. I love the city and her people, despite unfortunately only returning a couple of times since (although inevitably, I’ll be back).
The Irish are both the funniest and fiercest people on Earth, and this movie celebrates that. In a drunken rant once, I pretentiously rambled on about life in the city roaring… Pretentious, yes, but true. Partly a natural outcome of living with terrible violence and tragedy daily. Most of us have never really “partied like there’s no tomorrow.”
Like a lot of Oscar contenders, this is a film that marries a very personal story with a timeless examination of what it means to be human. It puts a magnifying glass against a much bigger stage, one that is as relevant today (if not more so) as it was 50 years ago. Most of Belfast is set on a single street and focuses on a single extended family, small in scale, epic in emotion.
It’s shot in beautifully crisp 4K black and white, which looks stunning. Colour is used sparingly to haunting effect, such as showing Branagh’s proxy character beginning to love the stage. The sheer joy of cinema and stage bursts off the screen as if the projector light is his gleeful love shining through. There’s even a little meta–Easter Egg for Marvel fans.
The main point to make about the sound is around accents. A character remarks, “If people can’t understand ya, they’re not listening.” I know the accents could put people off, or at the very least resort to subtitles when it’s on home release. To my ear, it sounded as if the tempo had been slowed slightly to make it more accessible for a non-Irish audience. That’s not to say it’s inauthentic, far from it – fans of Line of Duty will spot at least one classic Tedism in the dialogue. Rather, Branagh appears to have tried with his sound mix to be inclusive. It’s certainly clear throughout, there’s no mumbling or blaring soundtrack to distract from what’s being said.
So, what’s the story?
1969 was around the start of the modern “Troubles,” which would claim over 3,500 lives and injure almost 50,000. But Belfast is also people’s home. Her people fall in love, fall out, fall over, and get up, just like everyone else.
When I lived there, some friends appeared on an American chat show and took questions about life there. American students of the same age were visibly shocked to discover that their Irish equivalents had running water. After a quarter-century of war by that point, outsiders genuinely thought the city was a bombed-out shell with people eking out a living in the wreckage.
Belfast shows both sides, which is rare in stories about the place. It’s a biopic really, with Buddy, an analogue of Kenneth Branagh as a young boy in a pivotal year of his life. It’s painfully funny, like the people it depicts, and it is life-affirming.
It does a wonderful job of showing the first flowering of primary school-aged love crushes. It brought back Kirsty Baulch sharing her prawn cocktail crisps with me in Mrs Evans class 40 odd years ago. Seventh bloody heaven.
I’m delighted that Ciaran Hinds has received a Best Supporting Actor nom for his portrayal of the grandad everybody wants. His wife is played by Judi Dench; You don’t need me to tell you she’s brilliant. Their chemistry is beautiful.
Catriona Balfe and Jamie Dornan play buddy’s parents. Both have film star looks and glamour, but it works here, the childhood memories being portrayed need people larger than life. They are both excellent. I’ve not seen Balfe in much before (she’s best known for the TV show Outlander), but Dornan had a big job to do to win me over. I first saw him in the hugely disappointing and misogynistic series The Fall, and from there he went on to Fifty Grades of Shite. I don’t blame the guy for taking the money, but it was hardly a promising start to an acting career. Well, he does redeem himself here and, for me, he gets to deliver the outstanding line of the film. He is talented and has promise, not to mention being a painfully obvious choice for James Bond. I’d highly recommend The Siege of Jadotville on Netflix if you want to see what he’s capable of while you’re waiting for the home release of Belfast. That’s another true Irish story, and it deserves to be known. It may also be the closest thing I’ve seen to a real war movie with a happy ending.
The line that Dornan delivers is the thing that has stuck with me the most. A thug says to him, “Your problem is that you think you’re special.” He replies, “…and your problem is that you know you’re not.”
Much of our world now is dominated by men like that thug. Men with the bulletproof confidence and sense of entitlement fostered by an obscenely expensive education that slithers them into the centres of power. When power doesn’t corrupt the corrupted, it always reveals; it reveals a lack of esteem borne from a total absence of morality, humanity, or integrity. Inside, these men know they’re worthless. Their pathetic egos crave power as a mistaken substitute for value. And we all suffer the consequences. That little piece of dialogue encapsulates all this in such a simple, powerful way.
So, in summary, I loved the film and I recommend it. It won’t appeal to all: it’s a small, simple story that is unlikely to shake or change the world. But it will make you laugh, it will make you cry, and it will make you think.
Most of all though, it will make you share the wonder of a small boy, staring enraptured at a vast cinema screen.
You may still find Belfast in cinemas, and it will be on home release at some point soon.
