They say you can never go home again, and while the saying is nice, what it actually means is far less cute. The saying is meant to describe the feeling of being an adult and returning to where you grew up, seeing so many things without the sparkle of wide-eyed childhood innocence. Writer/director Kenneth Branagh (“Henry V (1989),” “Murder on the Orient Express (2017)”) seems to be trying to recapture that feeling of childhood whimsy with his film “Belfast,” and it absolutely does not go off without any, pun-intended, troubles.
Starring newcomer Jude Hill as Buddy, the film focuses on Buddy’s family trying to navigate the uncomfortable new reality of living in Ireland in the midst of The Troubles, a complicated ethno-centric conflict that mostly saw Protestants attacking Catholics. That’s a massive simplification of the events, and we’ll get into this simplification later on.
The film also stars Jamie Dornan (“Once Upon a Time,” “Fifty Shades of Grey”) as Buddy’s father, Caitríona Balfe as Buddy’s mother (“Outlander,” “Ford v. Ferrari”), Judi Dench (“Philomena,” “Skyfall”) as Buddy’s grandmother, and Ciarán Hinds (“Zack Snyder’s Justice League,” “The Eclipse”) as Buddy’s grandfather. The supporting cast is great, they deliver these performances with nuance and heart. Balfe is a particular standout, balancing the dual qualities of loving mother and firm parent expertly, Dornan as well proves to be great, although he simply just has less screen time to work with.
Dench is good, but she seems to be more coasting off of being Judi Dench than anything. Hinds meanwhile is a revelation, a perfect portrait of the warm grandfatherly figure seen in so many of these types of films, but rarely done with such excellence and kindness. Hill, meanwhile, is fine. He’s fine. There’s nothing objectively wrong with his performance, but it's not the kind that leaves a lot of an impression either. In reality, he just feels like a kid, for better or worse, with nothing to make him stand out from the crowd.
What does leave a massive impression in “Belfast” is its extremely scattershot nature. It’s almost as if Branagh loaded a buckshot gun with story ideas and went for quantity over quality. They aren’t bad, but none of them get the time to grow that’s really needed. There is a through-line to it all, being the aforementioned Troubles, but even that feels forgotten most of the time, despite the physical environment around Buddy changing because of it.
It leads to a lack of any sort of true emotional arc, despite the film featuring so many moments where emotional things happen. It’s a perfect way to distinguish between the two; just because you feature a standoff where someone has a gun pointed at them doesn’t mean tension is automatically created. It can still fall flat. In just ninety minutes, we go from Buddy crushing on a girl, to Buddy joining his cousin's gang, to the family struggling with whether or not to leave Belfast, to Buddy’s grandfather’s health troubles, and more.
It’s a lot to pack into just an hour-and-a-half, and it unfortunately feels like there are times where some things just fall through the cracks. There are also massive tonal changes that don’t work most of the time. Yes, this is a movie about childhood, but as a filmmaker, Branagh fails to bridge the gaps between the dire and the joyful, resulting in tonal whiplash when we go from scenes featuring Christmas presents and playing in the street to deaths and people being held at gunpoint. It’s a whole lot of moments that tell us how characters are feeling, without ever actually showing us what made them feel this way, even when they bring up specific moments that would make for great scenes that’d be easy to slot into the middle of the film.
It is gorgeously presented though. The black and white cinematography is no slouch, and it manages to provide a very particular kind of look to this story. It does end up being a double edged sword though, as the moments of color that spring up don’t end up eliciting the sense of wonder they’re hoping for. Instead it results in a kind of weird moment where you become more aware of the film-making process and, instead of being lost in the wonder like Buddy, you just think “how did they do that?” It does sound great as well, thanks to a score by Belfast legend Van Morrison that keeps things lively and memorable through his music.
“Belfast” is a tricky and messy film. To make the inevitable and obvious comparison, this is technically Branagh’s “Roma.” However, separate from any comparisons to that film, “Belfast” is the odd film that’s too short to provide a satisfying narrative, yet feels too long thanks to the scattershot nature of the plot that it has. It’s gorgeous to look at and the actors nail what they’re given, but it's hard to get invested when the events are so jarring and fail to really elicit any genuine emotional investment. It’s a pretty film and nice for a spell, but it doesn’t make any compelling argument to visit “Belfast” more than once. 3/5
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