What’s an Irish movie without a rendition of “Danny Boy”? Kenneth Branagh’s very-Irish “Belfast” confronts this question about midway into the film with an offkey rendition that’s oddly one of the scenes I found myself most drawn to. The moment itself, in truth, feels expected in a way that’s almost too proud of itself. A line in the film reminds us, “All the Irish need to survive is a phone, a pint, and the sheet music to ‘Danny Boy’”. It’s the kind of expected punchline that’s not particularly illuminating or incisive but it evinces a congenial chuckle. The scene in question with “Danny Boy” isn’t centred on any of the extended family of the young Buddy, our protagonist. Instead, it’s just a tipsy woman, off-kilter and off-key in her memories. And yet the moment feels a little more earnest and weightier than the film around it. This quasi-biopic is fashioned on Branagh’s own childhood, at the start of the Troubles in Ireland – the decades long period of religious conflict in Norther Ireland. And, yet, little in the film seems particularly urgent or vital. As a film, a lot of the urgency of “Belfast” seems to exists outside the film as it launches into local cinemas ahead of the upcoming Academy Awards, film enthusiasts are likely to seek out the film which is up for seven awards – the most for any of Branagh’s previous films.
Awards being what they are, it’s not unusual for a filmmaker to earn plaudits for a late career film that feels less energetic than their previous work. The plaudits feel out-of-place in a way, but a natural kind of extension of recognising a legacy rather than an individual film. But even in that context, Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” feels egregious even though the film itself is so self-effacing and gentle that holding it up to this level of scrutiny feels untoward. The gentleness makes sense. The film is centred around a reimagined version of Branagh as 9-year-old Buddy (played pleasantly in a nondescript way by Jude Hill), whose childhood play in the summer of 1969 is interrupted by the developing unease in his Irish neighbourhood. Buddy is navigating the pitfalls of childhood, his parents (Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe, also pleasant in a nondescript way) and his grandparents (Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds, who are, dare I say, also pleasant and nondescript?). The only member of the main cast who is not similarly pleasant and nondescript is Lewis McAskie as Buddy’s older brother, who leaves no impression in the film that the world pleasant would be a misnomer. But he is nondescript. If I sound cuttingly ambivalent about “Belfast” it’s not from any real bite, since Branagh’s conceptualisation of this world through a child’s perspective might be fittingly hazy. Indeed, I found little in it that’s particularly engaging but “Belfast” dissipates in the memory in a way that is not tinged with actual negativity so much as with emptiness.
A film is a film regardless of how it’s positioned or sold to you. Yet, it’s hard not to recognise how “Belfast” and its position as an awards player with a swathe of Oscar nominations feels critical to its recent release in Guyana almost six months after its release elsewhere in the world. In fact, this critical success has been the line that local cinemas have been advertising the film with. But it’s the nature of the beast. The magnifying glass of award season making a film be read in a harsher light. Backlash? Perhaps. But, would my ambivalence on “Belfast” be construed as more sincere if I said I first saw a screener of it all the way back in November and found it just as much of a shrug in film form then? Maybe.
“Belfast” is only one of a handful of films which Branagh has written that can be deemed as an “original” screenplay. His work as a writer has been more notable for his adaptative work, primarily with Shakespeare. Even his films written by others tend to be adaptations. And one of Branagh’s gifts as a director is navigating familiar material in recontextualised ways. Adaptive work is its own skill. Yet, for all its “originality” very little in “Belfast” feels like it exists on its own. Instead, it seems like a palimpsest of different kinds of versions of vaguely similar stories. Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, another black-and-white film from a filmmaker set into a historical time in the era of his childhood, was invoked. The comparison felt nebulous to me, but it persisted. Not just because “Roma” remains as one of the best films of the last five years, but especially because the comparison does “Belfast” no favours. In “Roma”, Cuaron was navigating cultural guilt in a tribute to his childhood maid where the real Cuaron was a hazy figure, mostly offscreen. In “Belfast”, Branagh’s personal memories are centred as Buddy ostensibly tries to come-of-age in a turbulent time. “Belfast” is more in line, at least theoretically, with Terence Davies’ forays into his past, although that comparison is also not helpful for “Belfast”.
But “Belfast” is very much a coming-of-age tale, no matter how indistinct. We know that Branagh did move to England in the wake of trouble in Ireland, so the film is very specifically working towards a world where a child must readjust their relationship with the world around them. It’s the end-goal that gives “Belfast” the closest thing to its structure. His parents, idyllically beautiful to look at, fight about “adult” things but in a way where we never worry that the fights are really in earnest. His grandparents tease each other in that way that movie-people do, that only reminds us of how wonderfully warm and wonderful they are. Buddy develops a crush on a girl that reminds us of his preciousness and his capacity for charm. The required debate between moving elsewhere for the family’s safety, and the worries about abandoning their culture give a sense of focus to the developments but like everything in “Belfast”, the place like its people are more sketches than complex renderings. That unoriginal “Danny Boy” reference from that woman feels more steeped in a sense of place, despite its expectedness, than much else at work here. For example, it’s hard to really get a sense of who these people are beyond this idyllic sketch of a family steeped in perfection with the exception of the muted issues of contentiousness that disappear from scene to scene.
And it’s why I’m fascinated by the strangeness of “Belfast” which feels as emotionally removed from itself as I feel from it. Nothing ever really pierces this fantasy bubble of “niceness”. It’s mercifully brief, at just over 90 minutes; although it’s a rare case where that brevity feels unfinished with what feels like so much missing context. One might explain away the vague listlessness as its imagination of a child’s perspective, and there are a handful of scenes where Branagh emphasises the child’s positioning in this so that the weight of the very important things happening around him are key but it never coalesces into something that feels genuinely thoughtful. There’s a strange carelessness to “Belfast” where successive scenes don’t add up to much; so nothing really seems to matter in the long-run. It could be the pacing of the editing, the vagueness of the screenplay, the sometimes jarringly strange perspectives of the cinematography or the energy of the film. But, for all the weighty big events around this family, the stakes here never spill over into anything resembling urgency, which feels especially weird for a movie that’s working towards a specific ending that should feel more earned.
Rooting my response to “Belfast” in comparative analysis feels unfair for a film so modest in its intentions. It is the kind of warm, and gentle release that may not have invoked as much analysis removed from its current awards context for many. And yet one genuine frustration with the film lives outside of it. In a year of some really thoughtful black-and-white cinematography on film, the digitisation of the surroundings in “Belfast” feel strangely dull and in comparison with the saturated and loaded textures in something like “Passing”, the way contemporary black-and-white engages with childhood uncertainty in “C’mon C’mon” or the clever move between colour and monochrome in “The French Dispatch.” “Belfast” seems to retain no clear intentionality about how it looks. This is rarely more obvious than in the opening scene, which moves from a colourful outlook of contemporary Belfast to the black-and-white past where the thesis of that switch feels vague and the texture of the period seems blank. It looks fine but there’s no real energy or character here. The parents look beautiful and wonderful. The grandparents look wizened and old. The children are cherubic and precocious. It’s all very much automated in a way that leaves no real lasting impression. Even the name feels fittingly indistinct, and in the case of the similarly titled “Roma”, there’s no sub-textual meaning beneath the ostensibly genericity of the name to excavate. In “Belfast” what you see is what you get. Nothing lies beneath.
I’ll say this for “Belfast”. It’s cute and warm and easy to watch in a way that I suspect provides comfort, especially in current times and especially when measured against the better films of 2021, which feel steeped in their melancholy. But, then, even if that cuteness feels like a liability when you think of it. That this film in this time with these situations goes down so easyily with nary a sense of urgent worry feels a little damning. It’s competent but declines to dig beneath the surface at every turn, almost skittish about any sense of emotion or death beyond the lavishly superficial. What remains in its wake is ambient niceness. But nice is different than good.
