review – Tim Gee's Blog

Belfast (2021) represents a significant milestone in British writer/director Kenneth Branagh’s career, being the first time he has mined his own personal history, namely his upbringing in working class Belfast in the late 1960s. Belfast is clearly a passion project for Branagh in a way that can scarcely be said of his previous directorial forays, which include a number of Shakespearean adaptations and the recent workmanlike Agatha Christie updates Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. The semi-autobiographical Belfast appears to engage Branagh’s emotional IQ as well as his technical proficiency as a director. Some critics have derided the film for its overt sentimentality and its undeniably rose-tinted view of the origins of the sectarian conflict known to history as the Troubles.

But I would defend the film’s standpoint on the grounds that it deliberately views the world with the eyes of a nine-year-old; specifically those of the film’s main protagonist, ”Buddy” (impressive newcomer Jude Hill, whose nuanced, un-self-conscious performance is by far the best thing in the film), who is essentially a lightly fictionalised younger version of Branagh himself. Seen through Buddy’s eyes, his parents (played in laconic style by Jamie Dornan and Catriona Balfe) and even his grandparents (Ciaran Hinds and regular Branagh alumnus Judi Dench) are heroic figures. The incipient sectarian conflict, while obviously distressing, is really just background noise to Buddy, whose immediate concerns are gaining academic promotion at his school (as measured by the proximity of his desk to the front of the classroom) and winning the romantic favour of his fair Catholic classmate Catherine (Olivia Tennant). The Troubles may have been a source of great angst and no small amount of terror for Buddy’s family and a primary factor in their eventual wrenching decision to emigrate, but for Buddy they were just another baffling aspect of the mystifying adult world just beyond his horizon.

The critics who have given voice to disapproval of the film’s sentimentality are given some ammunition by the stark black-and-white cinematography by Haris Zambarioukos. The scene is set in the film’s opening minutes, when a commanding full-colour aerial shot pans over contemporary Belfast before dissolving into a monochrome portrayal of the ‘mean streets’ of Buddy’s youth. Might we be going back in time? The omnipresence of Belfast native son Van Morrison on the soundtrack borders on cliché, as does the showing of an episode of “Star Trek” on the living room television. (Branagh does have the confidence to include an in-joke; at one point Buddy is shown reading the Marvel comic-book “Thor”, and the like-named cinematic version was Branagh’s own directorial contribution to the Marvel comic universe.)

But these criticisms might be said to fall under the category of quibbles. Branagh’s intent is clearly not to portray his personal origin story with Ken Loach style slice-of-life realism. Instead, the film is really a love-letter by Branagh to his extended family and the community that nurtured him. His portrayal of the Troubles really serves as a way for Branagh to contrast the more humane, liberal attitude of Buddy’s father, played with stoic understatement by Dornan, with the snarling, malignant intolerance of the Protestant stand-over man Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan). The father has a defining moment late in the film where he tells Buddy that the object of his awakening desire, Catherine, would be welcome in their house because the content of her character was far more important than any sectarian difference. The mother is more than a match for him, as witnessed in a semi-comic scene when she forces Buddy to return the ii-gotten box of detergent that he had purloined from a looted Catholic-owned grocery store. The family’s parlous economic circumstances, which compel Buddy’s father to leave and seek work in Britain, combine with the impact of the Troubles to force the family to resolve to emigrate in search of a better life.

And at the film’s conclusion Branagh includes a tribute which gives an eloquent testimony to the oft-neglected, lasting effects of migration: grief and guilt.

The American director Cary Joji Fukunaga faced an exacting and unenviable task when chosen to helm the 25^th instalment of cinema’s most enduring franchise, James Bond. The film entitled No Time to Die, (courtesy apparently of the random title/word generator used on these occasions) is the latest, long (pandemic) delayed, and the fifth and last to feature Daniel Craig in the eponymous role. As a filmmaker (and co-writer with Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Fukunaga had to pay due homage to the franchises’ six decades of history, studded with some of the most familiar (dare one say overused) cliches in cinema) to avoid alienating the franchise’s long-established fan base. He also faced the competing demand to somehow strike out and find fresh territory in such a perennial and familiar film universe. His efforts in this regard centred on Bond’s accumulation of emotional baggage through his five-film journey. Prior to Craig’s tenure in the 007 tuxedo, every portrayal of Bond, even those featuring the same actor, began each film as essentially a blank slate, carrying no physical or psychological scars forward from the various traumas he negotiated in the previous film. Craig’s Bond is supposed to be different.

As a result, Fukunaga’s film is a rather patchy compromise. There are the all-too familiar large scale action sequences, which are staged expertly and are never less than extremely watchable but nonetheless highly improbable. Bond as ever manages to defy death, serious injury and logic in these sequences (at least until the film’s climax, when Fukunaga’s film does find genuinely new territory). But the film’s unsatisfying compromise is always apparent. The entire Bond franchise has never really recovered from the damage incurred in the 1990s when the Austin Powers films so effectively demolished its cliches (with an honourable mention going to “You Only Move Twice”, the 1996 Simpsons ‘Bond spoof’ episode which featured the wonderfully named Hank Scorpio (pictured), a moniker which would sit easily in the rogue’s gallery of Bond villains.) Many of these cliches are still on show in the latest film; the chief villain of the piece (Rami Malek) rejoices in the first name Lucifer, and a last name, Safin, that evokes the indeterminate Eastern European origins of many of Bond’s Cold War era nemeses. Safin even devises his dastardly plot in a remote island lair (yes, really) protected by a loyal yet somewhat incompetent private army. Which, like so many previous Bond adventures, provokes the obvious yet unanswered question: how exactly does the average supervillain source and recruit an army of skilled henchpeople? Is there a website named Goons R Us or somesuch?

His name and choice of hideout location are not the only implausible aspects of Safin’s villainy. In a plot twist that stretches credulity to breaking point, Safin’s motivation metastasizes from a quest for personal revenge to a vastly more ambitious goal of widespread genocide. It as if the screenplay’s writers felt an imperative to raise the stakes, to produce a climax worthy of Craig’s 007 swansong. It is a gambit that might have succeeded if Safin’s character were more developed, but Malek’s performance in the role is uncertain at best. There are similar problems with Bond’s grand romance with Dr Madeline Swann (Lea Seydoux). The latter enjoys the extraordinary privilege of being the first female protagonist (it is probably high time to formally retire the outdated, misogynistic term “Bond girl“) Seydoux seems an odd choice for such a distinction, if only because her performance is so thoroughly anodyne and uninvolving, and there is so little chemistry between them, that she seems an unlikely object of Bond’s grand passion, which supposedly provides the rationale for his ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Their supposed mutual devotion suffers by comparison with the much spikier and engaging interplay between Bond and his doomed former flame Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) in Casino Royale (2006). And Bond in return seemingly has little to offer such a relationship. Many critics have written approvingly of the greater insight we are given into Bond’s emotional hinterland, but this character evolution seems to me only marginal at best; at his core, the Bond of No Time to Die appears to be largely unreconstructed from the “blunt instrument” to quote the memorable early assessment offered by M (Judi Dench) in Casino Royale. For all the greater willingness to exhibit his emotional side, he is still the stern-visaged, unsmiling assassin familiar from virtually every Bond incarnation, who spends much of the film casually despatching a large array of faceless henchpeople without the merest sign of remorse or even hesitation.

Despite the oversold and overhyped attempts to project greater emotional sophistication in the leading character’s persona, the formula for success in a Bond film hasn’t really changed that much over the years. You need at least a plausible chemistry to exist with the main female protagonist, and a singular villain who is both believably mendacious and charismatic without lapsing into a “Doctor Evil” style caricature. Without these crucial elements, No Time to Die is left to rely on the essential silliness of the plot which makes just too many demands on the audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief.

No Time To Die’s shortcomings are by no means unique to this particular film. Other long-running cinematic series have fallen victim to the exact same syndrome of ”franchise fatigue”; certainly Star Wars ,Star Trek, Mission: Impossible and the ironically interminable Terminator series, among many others, have similar problems. No Time To Die remains a very watchable and engaging film, and its surprising and quite spectacular denouement does pack a wholly unexpected emotional punch. But regrettably it is not a patch on Casino Royale, and the energy and sheer chutzpah with which Craig revitalised the franchise in that film have largely dissipated over his five-film tenure behind the wheel the 007 Aston Martin. It is unquestionably the right time for him to depart.