The Year’s Best Film to Date

W e’ve been watching Kenneth Branagh for more than 30 years, and he’s been having us on the whole time. We all thought he was “Johnny Posh Boy,” as he put it in a recent interview. Now that he’s 60, he’s inclined to discuss the splendid deception that is his life. He draws back the curtain and shows us who he really is in the lovely and affecting cinematic roman à clef, Belfast.

Branagh made two of the finest Shakespeare films (Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing). He married posh Emma Thompson, then moved on to the even posher Helena Bonham Carter, the great-granddaughter of a prime minister. (It was only H. H. Asquith, but still). Branagh epitomizes upper-crust English ease.

Branagh seems to be smiling every time a camera catches him, and now I think I know why. His life has been a lark. In fact he’s working-class Irish. His accent, as a boy, was so Irish that he worried no one in England would ever be able to understand him. As we learn in Belfast, a wonderfully intimate and deeply personal little picture shot in naturalistic (rather than expressionistic) black and white, Branagh was a confused eight-year-old — in the film, he is called Buddy and played by Jude Hill — when Belfast went mad. It was August of 1969. One minute, children were playing in the street; the next, an angry Protestant mob was storming through the area terrorizing Catholics.

The film is a successor to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, but I found Branagh’s much more emotionally engaging. I can’t get over the scenes in which the boy, Buddy (Hill plays the role with none of the usual child-actor mugging), sits and chats with his grandfather, Pop (Ciaran Hinds), while one or the other of them is seated on the bog — the (closed) toilet in the family outhouse. What a marvel it is that he (and we) achieved so much since those days. Can it really have been such a short time ago that people thought outhouses were unexceptional in Western Europe? After a brief color introduction showing bustling Belfast today, the black-and-white photography casts the story as a kind of ancient history, and so it was: An iPad-toting eight-year-old of today would scarcely be able to comprehend the norms of just half a century ago.

Branagh is the heartwarming opposite of all of those unspeakable manor-born politicians who try to convince us that they came from the salt of the earth; he rose from nothing and his gratitude is evident. There’s a scene in which the boy and his family, for a special Christmas treat, go to the pictures to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a film that embodies the shabby mediocrity that defined late 60s, early 70s culture, especially children’s entertainment. Through the eyes of Buddy, though, and even those of his older relatives, the film seems a perfect enchantment. Everyone gasps when the car flies. And the film is in color! Everyone goes home singing the theme song. A grander day out can scarcely be imagined in 1969.

Balanced against these childhood delights is the rancor of the sectarian violence that rapidly came to define Belfast and would do so for nearly 30 years. Buddy’s honest dad (Jamie Dornan) is a joiner who has to spend his weekdays in England doing manual labor while barricades go up in the streets back home. He and Buddy’s Ma (Caitríona Balfe, the star of Outlander) are struggling but surviving. Balfe’s performance — a tender but fierce mama bear — features several of the kinds of tearful scenes that win Oscars, but to me the one that really stands out is a joyous one near the end of the movie. Dad, reaching deep for the charm when things are looking dicey, sings “Everlasting Love” to her in a club, she responds with a flirty dance, and the world is sweet again.

The model of endurance is provided by Buddy’s grandfather and Granny (Judi Dench), who are long past the point of taking note of politics. The way these two pros play their roles, the lovebirds seem to have been together for ages, with well-established protocols for how to deal with one another. She is outwardly exasperated by his displays of flirtation but inwardly sustained by them. The pairing is a bit odd given that Dench is a generation older than Hinds, and she’s probably 20 years older than the character is meant to be, but you don’t say no when a talent of her level is available. After a career of outstanding work, Dench has somehow topped even herself here. Should she win another much-deserved Oscar she’d be the oldest performer (87 next month) ever to win one.

Except for anxiety about the cute girl at school and a brief and disappointing career as a shoplifter, Buddy’s life is steady as a rock. Then the earthquake comes. Protestant activists, led by an angry chieftain (Colin Morgan), want an ethnic cleansing of the Catholics from a Protestant area, and though Buddy’s Protestant family isn’t a target, his father is warned he must join the cause, of which he wants no part. “Cash or commitment,” he is told, and it’s chilling to picture how quickly all of Belfast could get sucked into the conflict.

The only tenable option is to leave, and Dad comes home one day cheerily announcing that for ten pounds, the entire family can relocate to sunny Australia. Australia? The other side of the world? The family’s options are to continue to live under a terror regime or to dump everything they know — school, friends, family — and hope to learn to fit in somewhere else. Even moving to England would be a leap into the unknown. Buddy bursts into tears when his parents suggest the possibility to him. As frightening as Belfast seems to the audience, everything he knows and loves is there. Seen through the eyes of a boy who merely asks for everything to continue on the same path, religious intolerance and political disputation seem even more poisonous than usual. His mother is on his side, and so the unrest in the street drives a wedge right through the middle of this ordinary family.

And what’s the meaning of the underlying quarrel, anyway? Buddy is told he should despise Catholics because their religion is one of “fear,” then Branagh smash-cuts to a hellfire sermon in a Protestant church. Suffering, damnation, eternal fire . . . with so much to worry about for eternity, you’d think the two tribes of Christians would realize their earthly differences are trivial. Instead, they rain punishment on one another. If you can make it to the end of the film without weeping for the 30 years of bloody turmoil in Northern Ireland, I fail to understand you.