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by drawkward86
Fri May 07, 2010 1:47 pm
Forum: Full Reviews
Topic: In the Name of the Father
Replies: 0
Views: 4038

In the Name of the Father

As with all my reviews, this has spoilers out the yin-yang.

Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father is based on true events and centers on the character of Gerry Conlon (Daniel Day-Lewis), a young working-class Northern Irishman who was framed by his own government, along with a few other “accomplices,” for the IRA bombing of a Guildford pub in the 1970s. That said, It would be misleading to call the film a biopic of its leading man; it is, rather, a picture about the dangers of any police state where innocent people are forcibly made criminals in order to quench the bloodlust of a terrified, vengeful public.

In this way, the film has obvious implications in present-day America. We live in a country that has refined this concept by focusing its rage on foreign prisoners in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. What’s more, it’s an approach that has fallen from almost unanimous favor among a populace incited to vengeful zealotry by a horrific attack on its own soil to such unpopularity that both 2008 presidential candidates felt compelled to unequivocally state that one of their first acts as commander-in-chief would be the closing of Guantánamo. It’s also worth noting that Gareth Peirce (played here by Emma Thompson), a civil rights lawyer who represented the Conlons during their appeal, has gone on to serve as the counsel for British Muslims who were held without charge at Guantánamo.

But Great Britain in the case of the Irish Troubles decided — felt it was forced, in fact — to take action against some of its own citizens in order to quell a populace that was, as Gareth Peirce quite rightly puts it, “baying for blood.” It was, consequently, a far more personal matter for most Britons than the desire of the easily distracted American people to see its perceived attackers punished, since for us the drama unfolds almost entirely on foreign soil and with foreign players.

As the film is at pains to point out, much of the British populace in the early 1970s lived somewhere that was more than once well within earshot of a bomb blast — and not just in Belfast either. The choice to open the film immediately, even before the opening credits, with the bombing that Gerry Conlon and his hapless co-defendants will eventually be charged with underscores this. You can practically hear the British public “baying” in the background of every scene, and it may well be that this is what writer-director Jim Sheridan had in mind by underlying many of the early prison scenes between Conlon and his father Giuseppe (Pete Postlethwaite), also wrongly imprisoned, with the offscreen shouts of their fellow prisoners (who, significantly, are just as vocal in their hatred for their perceived Irish attackers as the enraged citizens who harangue them in the early courtroom scenes).

This is all a very long-winded way of saying that In the Name of the Father deserves points for unswervingly making this statement about public hysteria (another phrase which is, incidentally, used at a key moment in one of the courtroom scenes, albeit in a public atmosphere far more sympathetic to the protagonists). What I’m not inclined to give the filmmakers credit for –- maybe I’m just being cynical -– is the irony in the way the British public is shown to come around to supporting the accused “Guildford Four” after calling so vociferously for their punishment when they are first accused.

The way the film frames this public change of heart seems meant to do little else than underscore the long-awaited and dramatic triumph of justice at the film’s end, but, whatever the intention, it wouldn’t be hard to put forth a reading of this film as a statement about the willingness of the public to believe whomever is shouting the loudest. I might even go so far as to say that this is my reading of it, though as a liberal-leaning American citizen in 2008 who’s long been disgusted by his government’s disregard for the civil rights of its prisoners and the willingness of the public to accept it, I’m probably more than a little predisposed to that way of thinking. The film’s frequent invocation of the British Prevention of Terrorism Act, which allowed the government to detain suspects for up to seven days without charges, struck a particular chord with me (and for the record, this little legislative gem is still in force in the U.K. So much for progress).

It might be a little strange that this aspect of the film figured so prominently in my understanding of it this time; I saw it once before a few years ago and don’t remember reflecting on it at all (I also remember liking it a lot more). The British people as the character of Outraged Masses only literally figure in the film’s two extended courtroom sequences. In the first, they call for swift and severe punishment and lustily cheer the guilty verdict; at the second, which concludes the film and neatly wraps the story up for us, they even more enthusiastically applaud Gerry Conlon’s exoneration. They are, however, constantly present by proxy in the rest of the film; they are in the faces of the unscrupulous detectives who, knowing that they must produce a cadre of acceptable Irish targets for the public’s frustrated fury, extract confessions from Gerry and his friends by torture; later, when the tide of public opinion has shifted, they are represented by Peirce, the archetypal solitary, restless lawyer who conducts a lengthy and perhaps hopeless campaign to expose the injustice of a government that stood blithely by while its own citizens were tortured and thrown to the dogs for a crime they didn’t commit.

I can’t fault the film for this fickleness in and of itself, since it seems to me a pretty accurate depiction of the way public opinion works. It could have certainly been handled more smoothly, though; the filmmakers fill in the blanks with a few brief shots of demonstrations in support of the Guildford Four that rather clumsily usher in the film’s final act. This receptiveness of an angry public to anything its government tells it is also the reason I don’t understand why the chief’s chief antagonist and architect of the framing, played by Corin Redgrave, is portrayed as an unrepentant, smirking sadist. The point would have been made a lot better if we could instead have seen him — and the institution he represents — as a misguided agent of corruption brought down by the absurd lengths he allows himself to go to in the interest of giving the people an effigy to burn. Maybe Jim Sheridan didn’t think we would believe it if this was the case, that in order for an injustice this great to be carried out there has to be a great, malevolent evil at work, not just Machiavellian detachment. What’s scary is that the latter is more often the case — horrible evil isn’t necessary for acts of horrible evil to be carried out; I wish the film recognized this.

This tendency to moral neatness is one of the main problems I had with In the Name of the Father on this viewing (like I said, I saw it once before a few years ago, and came away powerfully stirred — not so this time). The film seems to be operating under the belief that it spends plenty of time tooling around in moral gray areas with its hero and protagonist. He begins the film as a harmless but worthless petty thief, the kind of man-child whose instinct upon seeing a woman drop her keys on the sidewalk is not to return them but to break into her apartment and steal from her.

Conlon’s redemption comes in the person of his father Giuseppe, whose steadfastly high moral standards he has resented and tried to ignore his entire life, but whom he is finally forced to confront when they share a prison cell for more than a decade. Both begin the film in roles that are pretty much standard issue for dysfunctional father-son teams — chronic disappointment on the part of the father, whose abiding affection for his son is made tragic by his distrust of him; resentment on the part of the son, who, we are made to understand, chose a delinquent lifestyle in order to prove to his father that he really was no good, a lost cause. As they spend the better part of their sentences locked in the same cell, thrown even closer together by the instinctive hatred of the other inmates for accused Irish terrorists, their relationship, which is the film’s central focus, supposedly develops into respect, at least on the son’s side, but this development happens in a way that, despite the excellence of both performances, is muddied by the storytelling.

The film’s principal weakness, I think, is this entire middle section, which feels much longer than it is (in fact, it’s shorter than the film’s opening section that concerns Gerry’s conviction and confession, which is much better handled and flies by). Narratively it’s a mess, and I spent most of the 45 minutes or so that it took up wishing that the film would just get on with it. I’m not usually one for criticizing a film’s choice to stand still and ruminate on its situation rather than simply moving through plot points — I think I actually prefer slow films — but it’s different with a picture like this, particularly when you’re dealing with a classic “wrong man” scenario and you’ve chosen to present your film at least partly as a legal drama (though one thing I will give the film is that in many ways it transcends genre). Even more particularly, when this scenario is introduced so explosively — the scene of Gerry’s confession is undoubtedly the most powerful in the film — the narrative can only have strength when it’s forcefully propelled. A clever writer or director who wants more layers of meaning should be able to find ways to shade them in while the story continues on its way. For proof of this, you need only turn to the classic “wrong man” pictures of Alfred Hitchcock — The 39 Steps, Strangers on a Train, and even the comparatively light-hearted North by Northwest.

Take, for instance, an encounter with a small but key character, Joe McAndrew (played quite well by Don Barker), an IRA leader who shows up during the Conlons’ prison stay and reveals that he was the perpetrator of the crime for which Gerry and his father have been framed. He is shown first as a figure of sympathy, since we learn immediately that he confessed himself to the authorities and let them know unequivocally that they had imprisoned innocent people. But Giuseppe Conlon wants nothing to do with anyone who’s planted a bomb, even when McAndrew pledges himself to help exonerate him and his son. We quickly learn — that is, we’re led to understand rather than simply shown, a biased insistence on the way the audience is given information that this movie can’t let go of — that Giuseppe’s instincts were right; McAndrew, while continuing to aid the Conlons, begins a despicably murderous campaign against the English prison masters. It is clear by Gerry Conlon’s resulting disillusionment that this is meant as a turning point in his character, where he decides to put the irresponsibility of his past behind him and join his father’s tireless campaign to clear their names, but the whole experience rings hollow. The film doesn’t provide sufficient reason for McAndrew’s violence to beget this kind of sea change in Gerry’s character, and I couldn’t help but wish the time had been better spent.

Wouldn’t it have better spent, for instance, by focusing on the campaign of the Conlons’ lawyer, Gareth Peirce, who is played so well by Emma Thompson? She appears almost out of nowhere almost 90 minutes into the film, although we’ve been aware of her due to the fact that the story has been told in flashback through a tape-recorded testimonial Gerry has made for her and serves as a rather weak voice-over narration for the story. Bizarrely, the film provides no convincing background for the passion with which she tirelessly and single-handedly takes on the Conlons’ case. There are no scenes involving her with both Gerry and Giuseppe, and although the film is at pains to explain that the illness that eventually kills Giuseppe prevents him from leaving his cell, the narrative is missing out on an opportunity to enrich the film’s central narrative thread. It would, I think, have led to a much more stirring payoff at the film’s climax, which, while affecting, seems, like Gareth herself, to come totally out of left field.

And about that climactic courtroom scene where Gerry and his co-defendants are released. It’s triumphant, no doubt, but it’s robbed by much of its poignancy by how poorly put together it is. Why, for instance, lend so much emotional weight to the exoneration of Conlon’s co-defendants when they’ve disappeared from the last hour of the film only to suddenly reappear in the final scene? It gives the climax a touch of one of the most annoying features of a flawed “based on a true story” film – showing what happened for no other reason than this is what happened, even if the audience has been given no real reason to care as much as the film seems to care. And, even if it’s accurate, why interrupt the trial with a brief recess where almost nothing happens and Gareth and Gerry discuss something that adds a totally unnecessary wrinkle to the proceedings that turns out to be essentially inconsequential, and when it’s already been made clear what the trial’s outcome is going to be? It’s one of the most exasperating failures of pacing I’ve ever seen on film.

All these criticisms aside, I can’t bring myself to deny that In the Name of the Father is at the very least a decent film. It’s saved by a number of things. First, the design is excellent, and if it looks a little drab and unsaturated, it only serves as an accurate reflection of the way the Conlons’ lives, both in prison and at their home in Belfast, must have felt. Second, it’s well photographed, and the fact that it maintains visual interest in such a gray environment — particularly the long, monotonous stretches in prison — is a feat unto itself.

Mostly, though, the film is buoyed by its first-rate acting. Day-Lewis, Postlethwaite, and Thompson are uniformly excellent, and the small roles are generally well-cast, too. Day-Lewis, perhaps because he is playing, for once, a man who is, while not stupid, largely unhindered by a complex intellectual life, has almost none of the over-studied bravado common to even his best performances, where you can practically see the method oozing out of the pulsing veins at his temples (the one exception is a solo scene – an Oscar bait scene if I ever saw one – towards the film’s end, involving an unwound length of tape wrapped around his head and a lot of smashed furniture; you’ll see what I mean if you watch it). Pete Postlethwaite plays off him wonderfully, his stern stillness making for great counterpoint, the anguish caused by the unceasing war between his genuine love for his son and his nagging distrust of and disappointment in him barely suppressed and etched in every corner of his performance. And Emma Thompson is a firecracker as their outraged lawyer, although her scenes seem written and edited in such a way that Sheridan wants nothing more than to get on to the parts of the film that interest him more; like I said, her role should have been bigger, not only because Thompson is too good of an actor for a role with this much potential to be so slimly written, but because the film would have benefited from it as a whole.

The bottom line: In the Name of the Father is worth watching because its actors and its style save it from banality and make it a genuinely emotional experience, but it could have been so much more.