Belfast

Kenneth Branagh’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama about a young boy growing up in working-class Northern Ireland at the beginning of The Troubles is a slight but charming memory piece. Structured like a series of incidents and anecdotes rather than a traditional narrative, Belfast looks back on what it was like to witness the beginning of the violent conflict that would overtake the country for decades from the perspective of someone too young to understand the complexity of the forces and ideologies at work. Buddy (newcomer Jude Hill) can only go by what his parents and older relatives explain to him, which is reduced down to “bloody religion." A little more social-political context sneaking in through the margins would have elevated the picture to something beyond the feel-good work of nostalgia it is.

One can appreciate this film for what it succeeds in doing. It is an unsentimental but loving tribute to Branagh’s parents and all those who make the difficult choice to leave their homeland because they do not want to engage in the ideological warfare they see overtaking their lives. The performances are all wonderful, especially those playing the immediate family—Caitríona Balfe as Buddy's mother, Jamie Dornan as his father, and especially Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds as his grandparents. However, if you place Belfast alongside John Boorman’s Hope and Glory, Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants, René Clément’s Forbidden Games, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, and the countless other pictures about children growing up during and after a violent conflict, Belfast comes up decidedly short.

Many scenes depict Buddy and his family going to the pictures, which both grounds us in the period and provides evocative touchstones for those who grew up in the 1960s and those of us who were transformed at a young age by movies. But these scenes, in which the digital monochrome of the majority of this film is juxtaposed with the explosive color of the Hollywood images, draw attention to the oddly artificial quality of Branagh’s picture. I'm sure the look and sound of Belfast are meant to heighten the fact that the environment and episodic happenings that make up the film are meant to be memories, not a realistic depiction of a time and place. But this filmed-on-location movie looks as sterile and unblemished as this same year's highly stylized studio-shot picture The Tragedy of Macbeth. The heightened artifice in the later movie works to its great advantage, creating a theatrical setting where the Shakespearian text can take center stage. But Belfast is meant to evoke a real district in a lived-in era. It's hard to feel the power of the violence and potential violence depicted when the visuals cannot accommodate dirt, dust, stains, and other evidence of humanity—even the outdoor bathroom looks like you could eat off the toilet seat. And I'm rather baffled that this film is nominated for Best Sound. Perhaps if the award was for Cleanest Sound I'd understand. But this is one of those movies where you can hear every individual track that went into the mix, which has the opposite effect of creating the sensation of organically inhabited surroundings. Branagh has been praised for the directorial craft on display in this picture. But to me, this is a case of too much attention to design and not enough to narrative, themes, and subtext.