BELFAST

 
This is a memoir movie, and like all memoirs highly selective. It's told through the eyes of a boy growing up in Belfast (capital of the still English controlled "Northern Ireland") played by Jude Hill (my choice for Best Actor of 2021), representing the young Kenneth Brannagh (writer/director/producer) during the early years of "The Troubles" (late 1960s) when Catholics, treated like second-class citizens in their own land for centuries, emulated the Civil Rights Movement of the USA and received similar treatment, including being attacked, beaten, imprisoned, and killed.

But, by mostly filming (in black & white) from the perspective of a boy from a seemingly non-aligned Protestant family, the story focuses on the impact the brewing wider troubles have on family life. Growing up in the USA in a family of Irish Catholics, part of the Irish diaspora, I could relate to much of the charm and humor and feisty tenacity of the film's family and their domestic troubles. The acting is wonderful and as a nostalgic dramedy the movie worked pretty well for me, and I know very well for many of my friends who have no personal stake in the story's historical setting.

But I kept getting distracted by the false equivalency of Brannagh's Belfast Protestant family's "Irishness" (e.g. accent in one plot point) with a Belfast Catholic one, as though centuries of being terrorized by the English and their Irish Protestant allies wasn't "trouble" until the Catholics started protesting against it. Brannagh's entitled to his perspective, as we all are. Mine is this is an easy take on a hard time.