Belfast nabbed seven Oscar nominations this year, including nods for Best Picture, Best Director, and both Supporting acting categories, which seems like a decided lack of ambition for the voters. It is a perfectly fine film, pleasant and funny with enough of a serious underpinning to make it more than just a slice-of-life story, but there just isn’t that much to it, and if anything, the Academy whiffed on the one category where it deserved a nomination – Best Actress.
Belfast follows nine-year-old Buddy, a Protestant boy in 1969 in the titular city, the capital of Northern Ireland and the main site of the sectarian violence known as the Troubles that had begun just a few years previously. Buddy’s father (Jamie Dornan) works in England, only returning home every few weeks, so Buddy spends most of his time at home with his mother (Caitrona Balfe) and grandparents (Ciaran Hinds and Judi Dench, both of whom got Oscar nominations). He goes to school, where he has a crush on the smartest girl in the class, Catherine (Olive Tennant – yes, David’s daughter), and gets into trouble with his degenerate cousin, Moira, whose only role in the story is to shoplift. Buddy’s father also has to deal with the Protestant thug Billy (Colin Morgan), who insists that he must come to fight on the Protestant side or be considered a traitor and a target. When the August 1969 riots come to their quiet street, the situation becomes untenable, and forces the family to decide whether to stay in the neighborhood where they’ve always lived or take a job offer in England.
Branagh can be a heavy-handed director, but he works with a lighter touch here that reminded me of his work on Much Ado About Nothing, where he hammed it up as Benedick but largely let his actors (and the outstanding dialogue) do the work. Other than the decision to make this film black and white, a showy choice given the year in which the film’s events take place, Branagh stays out of the way, and the script has just one scene that doesn’t work (the club, although it was surprising to hear Dornan can sing), while the rest of the film provides the contrast between the mundanity of quotidian life and the stress of knowing that the place you were made is now less safe for you and your kids. It’s a slight film, but strong for its size, and gets in and out in about 90 minutes, just right for this sort of story. I just keep coming back to the film’s total lack of ambition – I’d say it’s like a novella, rather than a novel, but it’s not a matter of its running time (or page count). Belfast isn’t trying to do anything. It has very modest goals and it executes them well.
Did you have trouble understanding the accents? I didn’t but I also have workmates in Northern Ireland, my wife at times did have trouble, but common complaints I’ve heard from some is they wanted subtitles because they couldn’t understand what was being said. One even said they wished they had used aristocratic British accents, which would looked way out of place for a working class street in Belfast.
I almost feel like the reason that Balfe didn’t get any kind of nomination (whether lead or supporting, it seemed like most prognosticators pegged her for a supporting nomination) was that her performance was too understated. It always seems like Oscar voters generally opt for the louder, showier performances, especially in the supporting acting categories. I’ve long called this the Gooding-Macy Principle since that bit of silliness. Of course, it’s not like Judi Dench was chewing scenery in this, but I was still surprised she was nominated instead of Balfe.
I still feel like this was one of the top films of the year, but I think that’s frankly saying more about the rest of the field than the quality of this film, which was fine but still doesn’t feel like it was a truly great film.