Miss Flicks

Belfast: Film Review

Kenneth Branagh‘s semi-autobiographical film Belfast has been notching up a lot of awards and nominations this season and now I’ve seen it I can totally appreciate why.

The black-and-white film follows a working-class Protestant family living in Belfast, Northern Ireland during The Troubles conflict and is told through the eyes of nine-year-old Buddy (Jude Hill). The story opens on 15th August 1969, when a group of Protestants stage a riot on their street to intimidate the local Catholics in an attempt to drive them away. Pa (Jamie Dornan), who works away in England, wants the family to move to Australia or Canada to escape the violence but Ma (Caitriona Balfe) is reluctant about leaving their home.

I assumed Belfast was going to be a bleak, depressing and self-serious film but it’s not at all. It’s more light-hearted and funnier than I expected and I laughed out loud often. It must have been difficult to balance the tense and shocking riot scenes with the lighter coming-of-age content but somehow Branagh manages to walk that fine line. There’s less of a focus on the conflict than I expected and it’s more a backdrop to the family’s story than at the forefront. I’m glad about this because those scenes are quite upsetting and all the ones with Buddy are absolutely wonderful – he’s more concerned about wooing the smart girl in his class than anything else.

Newcomer Hill, playing a fictional version of Branagh, is given a bunch of comedic lines and he consistently cracked me up with the way he delivered his dialogue. He might not be the strongest actor in the world but he’s hilarious, adorable and the star of the show, despite being surrounded by big names.

The biggest revelation among the adults is Balfe, who really deserves the supporting actress nominations she’s been receiving. Her character is essentially a single mum, living with the stress of raising her two boys amid scary and unpredictable violence. She is deeply torn between her love of her home and giving her children a brighter future. Dornan’s Pa has the weight of the world on his shoulders and hates only seeing his family every other weekend. Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds are amusing additions as Buddy’s paternal grandparents and Colin Morgan is menacing as Billy, the local criminal who wants to recruit Pa for ‘the cause’.

I also had this misconception that Belfast would be a long, bloated and slow film but it’s not – at only 98 minutes, it flew by and left me wanting more. I would have happily watched another 5-10 minutes as an epilogue just to see where the family end up and that’s a big sign of how much I enjoyed it. What a delightful film.

In cinemas from Friday 21st January