February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The Sunday late-night slot drew a home audience of 4 million, with an estimated 250,000 more setting their VCRs to watch it at a later date. A strong showing in international festivals, winning the Audience Award at Sundance and the Golden Bear in Berlin Film Festival, earned “Bloody Sunday” its U.S. distribution.
But as its stateside launch date approaches, the loss of topicality has blunted none of the film’s visceral impact, and the hard-hitting drama will undoubtedly generate controversy here for its unequivocal indictment of British army brutality.
A joint venture of Granada TV and Dublin-based production company Hell’s Kitchen, “Bloody Sunday” brings together two formidable agitators against British injustice: executive producer Jim Sheridan, director of “In The Name of The Father” and co-writer of the hunger strike drama “Some Mother’s Son,” and writer-director Paul Greengrass, veteran of the BBC’s “World in Action” investigative documentary team. Their take on Bloody Sunday recreates the events of the 24 hours of Jan. 30 1972 in the Bogside, Derry’s Catholic enclave, from the pre-dawn military buildup by the Coldstream Guards and the 1st Paratroop regiment, to the numb silence that descends on the city that night as its Catholic population comes to terms with the massacre.
The film is made in a faux-documentary style that owes an aesthetic debt to the 1960s classic “The Battle of Algiers.” Greengrass uses abrupt focus shifts, unsettling cuts from scene to scene, and shaky handheld cameras to give the impression that the film was shot on the day of the march and hastily edited for immediate broadcast that night. This technique cranks up the tension as the organizers’ efforts to conduct a peaceful protest are overtaken by British army plans to round up the Bogside’s stone-throwing troublemakers at gunpoint, without regard for innocent civilian lives. As the chaos escalates, “Bloody Sunday” feels as though the camera operators themselves are caught up in the maelstrom of C.S. gas and high-velocity bullets, fleeing from the gunfire, to convey a terrifying real sense of what it was like to be there on that day.
In contrast with the rawness of the visuals, the film is tightly structured around one central protagonist, march organizer Ivan Cooper (James Nesbitt). A Protestant civil rights activist and an MP for Derry at Westminster, Cooper is torn between his determination to proceed with the march and his concern for the safety of his constituents in the face of the ominous army presence along the parade route. For viewers accustomed to Nesbitt’s lightweight leading-man persona in “Ballykissangel” and “Cold Feet,” his performance as Cooper is a revelation. Outwardly cheerful as he exhorts local residents to join the protest, but consumed with dread about the possibility of violence, and ultimately bearing the burden of guilt as he faces the press in the aftermath of the carnage, Nesbitt gives his finest performance to date in a career that had previously shown no such depth.
The filmmakers’ focus on Cooper inevitably occurs at the expense of the other civil rights activists, Eamonn McCann and Bernadette Devlin, who are portrayed as minor figures, and Derry Civil Rights Association leader Bridget Bond, who hardly features at all. But by concentrating on Cooper, the film is given the central story it needs to offset the shoot-from-the-hip visual style and hold the attention of viewers unfamiliar with the political context.
Protests of anti-British bias will inevitably follow the U.S. opening of the film, just as they did in Britain. As the Saville enquiry moves location to London, fresh evidence from eyewitnesses and forensic experts fortifies the argument long held by the Catholic community that the British army shot unarmed civilians without being fired on first by IRA snipers. The British army has never presented convincing evidence that their troops were in mortal danger nor their targets armed with lethal weapons, the criteria for use of deadly force in their own rules of engagement. Using eyewitness accounts as their template, the filmmakers have created a powerful rebuttal to the official version of the day’s events, and a searing indictment of British army arrogance and cavalier disregard for human life. “Bloody Sunday” is a must-see for anyone interested in the modern political history of Northern Ireland, and a riveting account of a single day that set the province on a war footing and swelled the ranks of the moribund IRA to create a formidable paramilitary force.
A salutary lesson on the grim harvest of violence, the film premieres Wednesday, Oct. 2, at the New York Film Festival and open Oct. 4 in cinemas throughout the U.S.