Belfast

Or: You can’t take Belfast out of the Boy

Kenneth Branagh is hoiking us on a trip down memory lane. The lane in question is his childhood street (or its nearest approximation) in Belfast, first introduced by drone shot in the warm, workaday colors of the modern day city, then looping over a wall into the soft black and white of 1969. Here Branagh’s childish avatar Buddy (Jude Hill) lives a near idyllic existence. The road is literally choked with kids to play with, every adult knows him and his people, he has the administrators of his mother (Cairíona Balfe) and the guidance of his often his often absent father (Jamie Dornan) and two wonderful grandparents (Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench).

The troubles begin with the Troubles, and violent mobs who suddenly appear in the neighborhoods, as they ware won’t to do, baying for Catholic or Protestant blood. For Buddy the conflict is senseless and arbitrary, but the random violence and the threats of local extortionist and Cumberbatch-look-alike Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan), force the family to consider leaving the only home they’ve ever known.

The movie takes great care to keep things below the doorknobs: a lot of the shots follow Buddy sneaking through his house spying on the arguments of his parents, or the growing vigilantism on his once harmonious street. We also get darling story of his first love, the primary school valedictorian Catherine (Olive Tennant), and his participation in increasingly dangerous heists by pigtailed delinquent Moira (Lara McDonnell, for whose clear diction I am most thankful).

Through it all Buddy remains suitably wide eyed and articulate, and plays well off the cast especially Balfe, who’s general exasperation runs from comic (tackling her son to avoid the rent man) to the marrow chilling (finding him with looted goods on their doorstep).

We get moments of magic too, all of the films and theater Buddy sees are in luminous color, more lifelike then life, which reflect in his pupils and (in a rare trick) on his grandmother’s glasses, or the fist classes dances between Balfe and Dornan, which really must set the neighborhood tongues waging. Our principal moments of magic comes from watching Dench and Hines, always a treat; though a salty, melancholy one as Pop grows frailer and Granny confronts the possibility of her family gone and no way to follow. The last few shots of her, the soul going out of her life and her city are the most haunting.

Much is made of falling rain and brickwork, the low slung but clean architecture of the city, and the soft brilliance of the sky. It eschews contemplation of the violent schism (and says and does less with England’s involvement) focusing instead to tread the paths of the shortpantéd to whom the world is both intimately familiar and entirely unknowable. I can certainly feel Branah behind it, coming back to the scenes and joys and trauma’s of his childhood. His care comes through the screen; it means a lot to him, and so it means a lot to us, too.