Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast is a film that holds back.
There’s the story it tells, the story it neglects to tell, and the little winks woven throughout the film that suggest it might have wanted to say more. Perhaps with different executive producers, the film may have taken on a slightly different tenor.
At first glance, Belfast is a coming-of-age story and a character study about Protestant, working-class Buddy (Jude Hill) and his family.
In typically Irish cinematic style, Belfast is meandering, though it remains enchanting. We see a year of Buddy’s childhood through his eyes: the love he has for his grandparents, the plight of trying to understand maths, the influence of his rabble-rouser cousin, who encourages him to shoplift from a corner store and chides him when he reveals he was only able to lift a Turkish Delight.
We also see his parents struggle with the decision to remain in Ireland as the Troubles continue, and his father’s work increasingly keeps him overseas, in England. Will Buddy’s family remain in Belfast? And if it does, what does that mean for its safety, its happiness? Buddy’s mother seems particularly distraught by the idea of leaving Belfast, which is all she’s ever known. In one scene, her friend reassures her that the Irish were meant to leave, meant to live all over the world. After all, who would open Irish pubs if the Irish didn’t spread their influence far and wide?
Which brings us back to the political backdrop.
The politics of Belfast aren’t incidental, since they drive the central question of the film, “Will Buddy and his family stay in Ireland?” But if you’re not paying attention, it feels as though the Troubles are minimized.
We open with a montage of Belfast in the present day. The very first scene is, appropriately, Samson and Goliath, twin Gantry cranes that live in the shipping yard of Harland & Wolff, which famously built the Titanic. The palette slowly fades to black and white, and we’re transported to a working-class, loyalist neighborhood in 1969, where Buddy and his friends and cousins play while their parents look on.
It’s in the next scene that the audience is reminded that we are in 1969 Belfast. We are in the thick of the Troubles, not quite at its 1970s crescendo. The simplicity of neighbors and children enjoying the afternoon is broken as street violence erupts, ostensibly led by the Ulster Volunteer Force, though the film never names it as such.
It’s a funny thing that the movie never names the “Protestant gang” throughout the film, though the clues are all there. Who are they attacking? The Catholic residents of the primarily Protestant neighborhood. What’s their M.O.? To “cleanse the community.” Ethnic cleansing isn’t exactly garden-variety gang violence. By the end of the film, the “Protestant gang” ends up feeling less like a gang and more like a paramilitary group that delights in recruiting children to its ranks.
This isn’t the only unusual way the film handles the conflict. It sticks to “Catholic” and “Protestant,” never uttering the words “republican” or “loyalist.” We also see almost nothing of the systemic oppression faced by the Irish. As far as I can tell, there are no Irish Catholic characters with speaking lines, save for Buddy’s school crush, who gets very little screen time.
But there are two other details in Branagh’s film that I think may have been missed, both of which make me wonder if this was merely an overly romanticized picture of ’60s Belfast, or if something more was going on.
The first is that you never hear Buddy, or his family, for that matter, identify as British either. They are Irish. They love Ireland. They are concerned with missing Ireland, if they were to relocate to Australia or England.
Not “Northern Irish,” not “Northern Ireland,” two names you only hear in the film when spoken on the TV. To Buddy’s family, to his mother, to his father who travels to England each week for his construction job, Belfast is a city in Ireland. One must wonder if the reason designations such as “republican” or “loyalist,” or “British” or “Irish,” are mysteriously missing from a film set during the Troubles is because, in Branagh’s eyes, whether Protestant or Catholic, they are Irish all the same.
For those unfamiliar with the conflict in the north of Ireland, these details may seem insignificant. Isn’t this a war about religion, after all? Not quite. The fault lines in the north are less about religion and more about who the north belongs to: the United Kingdom or Ireland. A loyalist would most likely say they’re British (or Northern Irish), whereas a republican would say they’re Irish.
The second detail is the role of the British government in the plot.
Is the government criticized for its treatment of the Irish? Again, no. But it also acts as a secondary antagonist in the film, for example when it’s suggested that Buddy’s family is being unfairly taxed.
It’s as though the movie wanted to criticize the British government more robustly but settled for smuggling it in, reminding the viewer that the British government didn’t treat anyone of a working-class background well. As a friend from Armagh put it, “As a child of the Peace Process, who lived through the Troubles, content that broaches the fact that the British government mistreated the working class, Catholic and Protestant alike, is missing.”
Why would Branagh shy away from more explicit criticism, though? It could have been that subtlety was the only way he could have said his piece without igniting political drama of his own. Maybe the lack of words such as “loyalist” or “republican” was the work of an executive producer. Maybe what we see on the screen is from his unconscious mind, at once able to identify who the antagonists are but unable to give them their rightful name.
Cahir O’Doherty, an Irish critic, wrote this of Belfast:
As though anticipating our growing reservations Branagh’s screenplay suggests that it’s really the local loyalist psycho “gangsters” who are the real ringleaders of the Troubles, […] who just make unwelcome trouble for all the ordinary decent Protestants […]
Look, at best that’s a reductive claim and at worst it’s indefensible. It lets an awful lot of people off the hook for a three-decade-long civil conflict that erupted at the turn of the 1970s. It suggests that the larger culpability of unionism — the blanket refusal to grant the same rights to others that they demanded for themselves — isn’t really addressed. Barely once. In a film about Belfast in the Troubles. It’s extraordinary.
Perhaps O’Doherty is right and my read is too generous. Perhaps there are no winks, no dog whistles, nothing to indicate that there is something else beneath the surface.
If the intended film is the film we got, then while Belfast may not be a fair or historical treatment of the Troubles, it is at the very least a charming depiction of one little boy’s childhood.
Katherine Dee is a writer and co-host of the podcast After the Orgy. Find more of her work at defaultfriend.substack.com.
