The United Kingdom got itself into a huge mess in Northern Ireland that bubbled over into outright violence around 1970. With the signing of today’s accord between the Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party this horrible era may be drawing to a close. I previously wroteup Bloody Sunday, Paul Greengrass’s amazing retelling of a 1972 rally gone bad.
In the Name of the Father, released in 1993, is an excellent fact-based movie concerning a second tragedy of the early years of the conflict. In 1974, the IRA bombed a pub in Guilford known as a military hangout and killed five people. Facing enormous pressure to pin blame and with recently passed legislation giving them a much freer hand, the Special Branch blew a tip given by a jealous boyfriend into the arrest and conviction of nearly a dozen innocent Irish people including three old people and two teenage boys.
For 15 years they proclaimed their innocence but even after an actual IRA soldier, caught dead to rights on a different attack, confessed the authorities refused to reconsider the verdicts. Even though they were largely the result of torture, even though they had nothing on the secondary defendents but the result of handling garden soil, they refused to reconsider the verdicts.
Finally a lawyer got involved in their appeals and, with the chief archivist out sick one day, saw the entire, unadulterated police file. In it she found a police interview conducted just a few weeks after the bombing with a witness who confirmed the two key men’s story, with a note attached: “Do not show to defense counsel.” This pretty much ended the legal travails, though too late for the father, who’d died a few years previously from lung disease.
Daniel Day-Lewis plays Gerry Conlon and Pete Postlethwaite his father, Emma Thompson their lawyer and Corin Redgrave the policeman responsible for their railroading; Day-Lewis, Postlethwaite and Thompson were nominated for acting Oscars while Jim Sheridan, who wrote, produced and directed, got nominations for all three jobs. All quite deserved but were shut out in a strong year, up against Philadelphia, Schindler’s List, The Piano and Remains of the Day.
Day-Lewis’s performance is the key to the movie. At the opening, Conlon is a (bad) petty theft in Belfast and can’t even stay out of the IRA’s notice. Dad sends him to London, where his sister lives, but Gerry has other ideas and hooks up with some school chums and their lady friends in a hippie squat. Out on a lark one night they see a prostitute drop her wallet but when she doesn’t respond to their calls they take it and help themselves to a wad of cash hidden in a bedpost.
Unfortunately, one of the guys who was already in the squat was pissed at Conlon for squeezing him out with a hot blonde and after the bombing got his revenge by dropping a word in a police detective’s ear. Conlon and three others from the squat are pulled in and tortured until they confess. At trial the claims of coercion are dismissed as a tactic to beat the charges and a tidal wave of English public anger results in guilty verdicts all around, life for the four key defendants and four-15 years for the other seven.
Reality finally sets in and Conlon starts growing up, but the years in prison with his father (they’re cellmates) as well as the other inmates have important lessons to teach him. In the hands of a lesser actor the subtle changes required by the role would’ve been too much but Daniel is quite capable.
definitely recommended
