Belfast (2021)
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Belfast Movie Review
Belfast is a 2021 coming-of-age historical drama film directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Jude Hill in the main role. It’s a familiar movie that is well made, but far from great.
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“The Irish were born for leavin’,
otherwise the rest of the world’d have no pubs“
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This is a semi-autobiographical film which chronicles the life of a working class family and their young son’s childhood during the tumult of the late 1960s in the Northern Ireland capital. Many have pinpointed the familiarity of this project to another Oscar nominee, which is Cuaron’s ‘Roma’. They are truly similar as both are semi-autobiographical tales told by their directors in their bid for Oscars and both are about a singular time period and place. Both were also shot in black-and-white.
However, similarities end there. For one, ‘Roma’ was much more artistic, authentic and moving while Belfast is overly populist and saccharine to the point that it never really gripped me. In fact, I was rather frustrated by its evident strides to appeal to the widest audiences possible, which contradicted the otherwise artistic cinematic sensibilities of the movie. There is this persistent conflicted identity to this film that genuinely baffled me.
Kenneth Branagh is a confident, superb director, and certainly one of his generation’s best. However, his directing here was highly problematic, which is unusual for him. While I do get that he feels extremely nostalgic for his childhood years in Belfast, that nostalgic feeling ended up muting the movie’s more serious elements, such as the protests that happened in the Northern Irish capital during 1969.
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The movie failed to properly explore this fraught relationship between the Catholics and the Protestants in this city as it focused way too heavily on romanticizing the past, going so far as to entirely clouding any realism that the movie otherwise hinted at in its first half. This uneasiness of the tone was a persistent problem that unfortunately diminished the enjoyment of the movie for me.
Jamie Dorman surprised me here. He was well cast having been raised in Belfast himself. This is by far one of his most serious roles and he really delivered. Judi Dench is reliably terrific as the granny character while Ciaran Hinds was stupendous in every scene. However, the standout has to be Jude Hill in what is one of the best child acting performances in the last couple of years.
He is so believable and likable as Buddy while his constant examinations of everything that is going on around him made him quite endearing. The movie is at its best when focusing squarely on him as the other characters all failed to make as big of an impression as this bright sunshine of a kid.
Belfast is gorgeously shot. The opening is so amazing as we see the shots of modern day Belfast in color and then we skip this billboard and arrive to the black-and-white past. This beginning was so incredible that the rest of the movie failed to compare to that level of technical and directorial craftsmanship.
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Still, the cinematography is strikingly polished and visually arresting while the score is also fine, though using too many scores from movies. The number of movies emphasized here and given homage was overwhelming. I liked it to a degree of course as I am a big fan of cinema history, but it again exemplifies the extreme nostalgia that plagued the movie.
