You Can’t Go Home Again

Kenneth Branagh
Giorgia Meschini, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Film Review of Belfast

By Geoff Carter

As a medium, narrative film is a palimpsest that draws the best from other art forms; like literature, it can convey the impression of a time and place through dialogue, characterization, and setting. Like two-dimensional art, it can frame an impression through framing, composition, and hue. Like music, it brings rhythm, emotional intensity, and tonality to a narrative. In the hands of an auteur—like a Hitchcock, a Renoir, or a Scorsese—film can create a subjective sensibility of time and place that, while foreign, is instantly recognizable and relatable to an average viewer. 

Kenneth Branagh’s marvelous film Belfast chronicles the lives of an average Protestant family living in a mixed Belfast neighborhood with a loving hand. Branagh himself grew up in the titular city and experienced the violence between Catholics and Protestants in the summer of 1969. 

In an interview on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, writer and director Branagh talked about the street where he grew up in Belfast as a mixed but peaceful community of Protestants and Catholics. He said his extended family lived nearby and that “if you weren’t related to someone in Belfast, you went to school with them.” But this secure and comfortable world was upended when anti-Catholic violence reared its ugly head. 

The film Belfast opens with an aerial tracking shot of the city filmed in gloriously saturated color. In a beautiful opening sequence somewhat reminiscent of the opening on the 1961 version of West Side Story, the camera slowly tracks closer to the earth, revealing neighborhoods, streets, and houses, and then, as it peers over a wall onto a street alive with residents, children playing, and workers hurrying home, the screen switches to black and white, a conceit that we’ve been transported back in time. 

The camera then comes down to street level—a child’s eye level—and follows young Buddy (Jude Hill) as he makes his way home from playing. The effect is not nostalgic—although the affection conveyed by the film for this time and place is readily apparent—but it effectively eases the viewer into a past world, a child’s world, until it is suddenly disrupted by the violence of a mob swarming down Buddy’s street, smashing windows, and setting fires. The child’s disorientation and gradual realization of what is happening is conveyed through a 360-degree tracking close-up of the child standing dumbfounded in the street.

This is the starting point. After the riot, the neighborhood and gets back to normal—or as normal as events will allow. The viewer learns Buddy’s dad is absent, working in England. His mom, with the assistance of Buddy’s Grandpa “Pop”, (Ciarin Hinds) and grandmother “Granny” (Dame Judi Dench). Buddy, do their best to raise Buddy, along with his older brother Will (Lewis McAskie). The characters, particularly Hinds’ and Dench’s grandparents, are lovingly drawn. They are—at times, for this viewer—too cute by half, but Pops’ pearls of wisdom given to his grandson, particularly those gems dealing with his math homework, are hilarious and touching.

Ma (Caitriona Baife) feels all the pressures of being a single parent, trying to keep the boys in line, but all the adults in the neighborhood know Buddy, watch Buddy, and feel free to discipline the lad when necessary, as they do with all the neighborhood kids. 

Buddy’s dad is a decent man, doing the best he can, but feeling guilty about leaving his family behind while he earns his living abroad. He worries about the troubles in Belfast, especially as Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan), a local thug who is working to shake down the residents, tries to enmesh his sons into the local Protestant activities. 

When Da and Clanton face off in a showdown reminiscent of classic Hollywood westerns, like The Man Who Shot Libety Valance and High Noon, which we catch Buddy watching (along with Star Trek) earlier in the film, it is the actualization of the boy’s adulation of his hero father and—surely—a trick the director’s mind is playing on him. The sequence is so implausible that the viewer must necessarily classify it as fantasy—in this case, childhood memories mellowed by years and sentimentality. 

At times, Belfast’s stylistics echo Fellini or Antonioni’s stream-of-consciousness techniques, and so the narrative is only loosely grounded in time and space. Buddy goes to school, visits his Pops and Gran, sees his dad on the weekends, and sits through paralyzing fire and brimstone sermons from his church pastor. One sequence tumbles onto another, much as real childhood memories do. Which is in fact the point of the movie, which is not as much of a childhood reminiscence as it is a reconstruction of the yaw, pitch, and heave of memory’s fabric. 

Before anything else, Belfast is a beautifully rendered coming-of-age movie. It is an idealized stroll down memory lane, a road that in this case is sometimes paved with hate, violence, and intolerance. Branagh’s triumph of family and community over these elements may seem on the surface to be obvious and perhaps even trite, but it is a tribute to his abilities as a writer and a director that the film embraces this sensibility while still maintaining its sense of purpose as an ode to the strength of love.

Belfast is, in every sense, a family film, an autobiography, and a love letter. It is a beautiful film destined to be a classic. In considering the old adage of “you can’t go home again”t, if Branagh hasn’t taken us there, he’s brought us as close as possible. As Pops tells Buddy after the boy asks where he’ll be, the old man replies, “I won’t be where you can’t find me.” And so it is with memory.