Bloody Sunday

This is a film with a terrible nerve, from the press conferences in the Sunday morning, through the preparations for the march and the preparations of the military, and forward to the scenes in the hospital afterwards. The camera is working in a way, there you definitely can feel the gloomy weather and the excitement.

It's also a 1972 feeling about it, which doesn't feel acted, but like a documentary. James Nesbitt is making a tremendous job as the MP and when you notice that this man hasn't got an Oscar, the Oscar institution definitely seems like the stupid joke it is.

The only thing you can have against this Paul Greengrass' movie is the tendency in the end, where the relative documentary objectivity in the beginning, moves over to tendency. The unionists and the British government remain the totally bad guys and the catholics are the eternal martyrs. They might have been that this Sunday, but the conflict of Northern Ireland is a little more complicated.

However, this is definitely more exciting than most of what you see in the action genre.

Although initially difficult to get into, Bloody Sunday proved worthwhile persevering, as the latter half puts the viewer in the carnage.

The acting, especially James Nesbit is excellent, the recreation of the mood is superb although it was obvious with the constant close ups that there was very little budget to recreate the scenery. The geography was never explained and therefore would leave a viewer without prior knowledge of the area disorientated.

The documentary suffered from not being able to set the scene, a lot had happened in the week prior to the Civil Rights march that put both the participants and the security forces on edge and made the advance more significant. The question of why the Paras were sent to Derry were never fully explored.

Overall it was flawless recreation of events from the point of view taken by the film makers on this particular incident. It is worth noting that this is based on the Irish Governments review of the Widgery report into Bloody Sunday. (NB the Widgery report is mostly considered by nationalists to be a white wash)

"Bloody Sunday" is a very startling, cinema-verite recreation of a very specific date (January 30, 1972), in a very specific place (Derry, Northern Ireland) of an event that for the Irish became "our Sharpeville."

But for an American audience with no benefit of subtitles for the brogues and working class Brit accents, no explanations outside of eventual context for lingo and slang (it took me awhile to keep track of "provos" vs "paras"), the quasi-documentary, in-your-face approach takes on a tragic universality.

It could be part of a Cassandra trilogy with `Black Hawk Down' and `No Man's Land' about why military should not be in charge in urban strife, whether as "peacekeepers" or in civil wars or regime changes, no matter how heinous the regime to be changed. A lesson for the Baghdad invasion planners?

Cities are complicated social ecologies, and the film shows a great diversity of attitudes and pressures on all sides, managing to be both clinical in meticulous detail and visceral in shocking impact. The film is probably not objective about the British (I don't think it's a coincidence that the imperious Brit "observer" who takes repugnant charge is played by Tim Pigott-Smith who was a similar colonialist in `The Jewel in the Crown.") A central universal image becomes the awesome power of rock-throwing, unemployed teen-age boys to spark war.

The liberals in the middle, clinging to dreams of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and fair community relations, are morally destroyed over the course of a few hours and the extremists with guns on both sides feed on each other in perpetual destruction like the ouroboros image of the snake eating itself. I kept feeling I missed the exact flash point in a wandering attention moment and wanted to immediately re-watch it to see if I could track the gotcha! moment when escalation could have been prevented, so I look forward to this being available on video tape.

But the film does clearly show that it was attitudes that created the violent outcome and consequent government non-investigation, as we see in so many police situations. Once soldiers enter a city it is a police situation with all those complexities.

I know James Nesbitt primarily from frothy Irish comedies, like `BallykissAngel,' so his staggering portrayal of the M.P. in the middle is a revelation, as he goes from planning a civil rights march to pleading with his girlfriend to physical heroism to a break-down in shock.

The version of the titular U2 song played out at the end, running well past the credits finish, is a moving, live, passionate audience sing-along where Bono shouts out other locales that have experienced similar situations to emphasize the universality.

I thought this was an amazing movie.

Now I learned about this in school for a while and as an Englishman I do feel a certain, oblique connection to the troubles. I didn't realise this kind of thing could happen among my compatriots (I'm not trying to belittle Irish Nationalism by calling the Northern Irish my compatriots, it's just how I have come to see them), and I hadn't realised I'd thought this way. It was a real consciousness raiser for me.

My biases notwithstanding, this movie is as a hypnotic account of a confusing episode of an even more confusing time. It has the task of representing the mindset of the times, the mindsets, I should say, while still making it into a spontaneous narrative.

I'm not an expert so I cannot vouch for the authenticity of any of this, but I feel I can believe all of it. There is a tendency for us to demarcate history from real life. A million deths is a statistic as Stalin said. But here I really feel history and the lives of regular people converge in a devastating way.

At its heart I suppose the movie is a mystery. Not so much who-done-it but a why-did-it. I really felt while I was watching, all the chaos and threat that leads to tragedy while still feeling baffled and disorientated throughout. It feels like a documentary. The dialogue is spontaneous but still rich with nuance. The cinematography is candid and even shaky, giving it an often hypnotic, Blair Witch quality.

A movie to never forget.

Obviously an important day in history, and the events of that day are breathtakingly conveyed by the best Docudrama filmmaker we have, Paul Greengrass, Before we Knew who he was-and that may have made a certain difference in my experience of the film-it was more exhilarating (and impressive) before Greengrass had made a name for himself at this kind of documentary-styled filmmaking. This one, when it came out, definitely gave me goosebumps....todd gold