Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Belfast’ on HBO Max, Kenneth Branagh’s Lively, Joyous Childhood Reminiscence

Now on HBO Max, Belfast may be Kenneth Branagh’s most significant directorial effort since he made a four-hour version of Hamlet 25 years ago. It’s a comedy, it’s a drama, it’s a nostalgia piece, it’s generally autobiographical, it’s shot in black-and-white (mostly, anyway), it’s truth, it’s myth and it’s Oscar bait, but don’t judge it for any of that. Branagh wrote the screenplay during Covid lockdown, recreated the streets outside his childhood Belfast home and secured a stellar cast in Judy Dench, Ciaran Hinds, Caitriona Balfe, Jamie Dornan and, perhaps most significantly, Jude Hill, the sparkplug talent stand-in for Boy Branagh, 1969. One thing is clear about the film – Branagh is putting a lot of what he’s got into it: Heart, humor, honesty and affection.

BELFAST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s a sunny, cheerful day in Belfast: 15th August, 1969. Children run and play and kick footballs in the street, mothers shout for their boys to come home, shoppers and merchants mingle and chat. Buddy (Hill) plays with friends, clashing wooden swords and trash-can-lid shields just as Protestant rioters rumble through the streets targeting Catholic homes, smashing windows and throwing rocks and sticking rags into gas tanks and lighting them on fire and rolling them down the street and standing back while they explode. Buddy’s mother, known only as Ma (Balfe), dashes through the tumult and grabs her son and the bin lid, holding it above their heads, rocks bouncing off it. She rushes him into the house where he hides under a table. His brother Will (Lewis McAskie) soon joins him.

Pa (Dornan) isn’t there. He works in England, sometimes for weeks at a stretch, as a joiner, a woodworking trade. They’re Protestant in a mixed community, blue collar. Ma and Pa aren’t big on going to church. But they go to please Granny (Dench), Pa’s ma, and Buddy is clearly quite terrified by the fire-and-brimstone-then-please-pass-the-plate sermon he receives from their profusely sweating pastor – there’s a fork in the road and one leads to Heaven and the other to Hell and guess which one is the Catholic one. Granny is a dear old woman, 50 years on with Pop (Hinds), and Buddy frequently visits with them, to ask them questions and listen to their wise answers, and when I say “wise” I mean both “wisdom” and “wise-ass.” They have quite the senses of humor.

Buddy loves going to the cinema – they see One Million Years B.C. which Buddy and Will enjoy for the dinosaurs; Pa, and possibly also Buddy and Will, enjoys it for Raquel Welch, while Ma is unamused. Pa has tax debts and Ma pays them diligently when he’s gone and when she pays them off down to zero and asks for certification the damn government just finds more debts. Buddy also loves Catherine (Olive Tennant), the girl with waist-length blonde hair at school who’s good at maths and therefore inspires Buddy to also be good at maths because the students are seated according to their scores on times-table tests. Pop’s advice: Smudge the handwriting so the 7 might look like a 2 or maybe also a 1, and he knows it works because he’s in debt too, just like Pa. Anyway, as you surely know, the street tumult isn’t over. Barricades and checkpoints border the neighborhood, and a local Protestant strongarm intimidator (Colin Morgan) keeps pressuring Pa to pick a side or else. That’s why Pa and Ma are considering – and fighting about, you might say – uprooting themselves and leaving Belfast and everyone and everything they know. For their boys.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: It differs in tone and POV, but Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma is similarly powerful, sumptuously black-and-white nostalgia-with-depth.

Performance Worth Watching: Please don’t make me pick one. There isn’t a single cliche in any of these performances: Branagh’s smart, funny script benefits Dench and Hinds the most – they get all the best lines, and remind us why they’re old pros. Dornan shows depth we haven’t seen from him in his biggest films, and has terrific chemistry with Balfe, who has a robust, Laura Linney-like screen presence. And Hill is a gifted charmer with crisp comic timing.

Memorable Dialogue: “Them curries, I tried ’em once. I had to wear a nappy for a week,” says Granny.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Belfast is a triumph of tone and point-of-view. Branagh funnels dire consequences – the onset of The Troubles, essentially a 30-year civil war – through the eyes of a schoolboy, who’s blissfully unaware of his innocence. He’s a very typical nine-year-old that way. He’s been shaped by his parents and grandparents, who are good, loving people doing their best for their families, whether the streets are full of cheer or full of tanks. He’s been raised a Protestant, and sees the larger conflict quite simply: Catholics can do whatever they want no matter how horrible, and still get into heaven if they confess their sins. A terrible sentiment on paper, but to hear a kid say it? It’s funny. But he’s also immersed in a community that’s a loving place, full of Catholics and Protestants content with their differences and drawn together by the love that proximity brings.

The film doesn’t focus on the upheaval; instead, it churns in the background of the familial day-to-day – barbed wire in the foreground of a shot, a TV news report signs off for Star Trek. Scenes are dramatically heightened by both Branagh’s unwavering adherence to Buddy’s perspective, and by his own halcyon memories. Once the harrowing turmoil of the opening sequence fades, the story settles into the offbeat rhythm of the boy’s life: His calculation to get closer to the maths whiz is far greater than mere multiplication. He spends time speaking with and listening to his grandparents. He collects Matchbox cars. There’s a troublesome shoplifting incident. Every time Pa leaves town for work, he advises Buddy, “If you can’t be good, be careful.” Buddy and Will watch The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance on TV, pretending not to listen while Ma and Pa heatedly discuss money or the probability of moving the family to Sydney or Vancouver.

One exemplary moment of Buddy’s life occurs at the cinema, of course – just look where Branagh ended up. Pop is in the hospital with ailling lungs, so Granny tags along as the family watches Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and when the car careens over a cliff and takes flight, everyone in the theater leans forward and gasps. Uh huh. We can trust this movie’s point-of-view as far as a car can fly. But that’s how Branagh chooses to remember the moment: with childlike wonder.

The film is cut from the whole cloth of such embellishment. It doesn’t render the movie void of meaning or truth; telling a story of deadly conflict from a child’s perspective is invaluable for the way it underscores the value of naivete and youthful purity. Buddy gives the story a lightness that emphasizes life’s joys far more than its burdens. Written and edited with great economy (and episodically, like memory), shot with the wide-eyed clarity of high-contrast black-and-white, Belfast is a distillation of Branagh’s age of innocence. It’s shaded with homesickness but radiates warmth. It’s far, far more sweet than bitter. Far, far more.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Belfast is absolutely delightful.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.