March 12--First performed in 1923, following an early chapter in that quaint, understated late 1960s-coined cycle of violence known as the Troubles, Sean O'Casey's play "The Shadow of a Gunman" imagined a crowded tenement house that becomes a microcosm of the Irish War of Independence. A key scene in that play depicts British Black and Tan forces conducting a raid, to deadly results.
Ireland's troubles with Britain have explored in hundreds of plays and films by now. The latest film is one of the very best: "'71," a Belfast-set manhunt thriller that puts us in the precarious situation of a British private stranded behind enemy lines. It might've been titled what O'Casey originally called his play: "On the Run." Swift and exciting, with no taste for the usual war movie heroics, first-time feature film director Yann Demange's film belongs on a short list of immersive, rattling, authentic fictions right next door to the fact of survival inside a war zone.
Jack O'Connell, lately in "Unbroken," plays Private Hook, a new recruit of the British army, deployed to what his superior officer characterizes as "the deteriorating security situation in Belfast." A product of the foster care system, Hook reassures his younger brother (Harry Verity), who lives in a grim, clinical "children's home," that he'll back soon. "I'm not even leaving the country," Hook says. "So you've got nothing to worry about."
We know, though, that he does. "'71" ushers Hook and the other recruits into Belfast, where the Protestant Loyalists, Catholic Nationalists, the Irish Republican Army and the "provisional" IRA street fighters are all out for blood, or running for safe cover, and few allegiances are clearly drawn. The British soldiers work alongside undercover units with shadowy, tentacle-like connections to various factions in Belfast.
The riot begins with Hook and his fellow soldiers pelted by Catholic kids bearing urine balloons and bags of feces. It intensifies quickly. Hook and another soldier are separated from the unit. The other man is killed by local thug Haggerty (Martin McCann); Hook gets away, and the rest of the movie turns this ordinary bloke into a maze runner, without the comforting context of dystopian science fiction. He scrambles for cover, searches for allies and protectors, while those charged with his safe return do the same. Hook wonders if this particular conflict is being handled properly by "his" side. Or anyone's.
Screenwriter Gregory Burke lays all this out with unusual lucidity, though his teeming character roster can get a bit confusing. Burke wrote the Scottish-warriors-in-Iraq play "Black Watch," and "'71" carries a similar gut impact. Focusing on a young British soldier in the middle of a Belfast nightmare might seem dodgy to some, but it makes sense here; it works; the ambiguities of purpose and alignment prevent the audience from an easy, reductive good-vs.-evil response.
Similar to the style of director Matteo Garrone and his Italian crime film "Gomorrah," director Demange hustles behind his actors like an eavesdropper or a battle correspondent, giving each new scene and set of characters a chance to register without letting them derail the narrative locomotive. Sean Harris is particularly sharp as Browning, the whippet-like undercover operative who seems to be everywhere and know (and hate) everyone. Without spoiling anything, the final, sobering sequence brings to mind Kubrick's "Paths of Glory."
I use the comparison cautiously. "'71" doesn't quite make the leap into greatness and emotional devastation the very best war films make. By design we don't get to know O'Connell's character, or anyone else's, beyond the hell he's put through, which is plenty gripping on its own. Demange and cinematographer Tat Radcliffe shot it mostly in Blackburn and Liverpool, standing in for early '70s Belfast, using 16 millimeter film for daylight sequences and digital equipment for the nighttime scenes. The blend is seamless. The movie excites, but intelligently, without stoking blood lust or Old Testament revenge impulses.
In O'Casey's "Shadow of a Gunman," the poet masquerading as an IRA bomber spoke of "ugliness that can be made beautiful, (and) ugliness that can only be destroyed." The success of "'71" can be measured this way: It presents both sorts of ugliness, plus a redeeming grace note or two, humanizing the carnage of the Troubles with nary a speck of sentimentality.
"71" 4 stars
MPAA rating: R (for strong violence, disturbing images, and language throughout)
Running time: 1:39
Opens: Friday
mjphillips@tribpub.com
