Say Nothing Says Too Much and Shows Too Little

Photo: Rob Youngson/FX

Early in the premiere of Say Nothing, FX’s nine-episode adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s meticulously researched 500-plus-page book on The Troubles, a teenage Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew) and her sister Marian (Hazel Doupe) are ambushed while participating in a nonviolent march organized by Catholics yearning for peace. The attack is horrifying: The marchers’ police escort stops, effectively trapping them on the road, as British loyalists appear over a hill and race down to mercilessly beat men, women, and children with rocks and clubs. Shaky handheld camerawork adds effectively to Dolours and Marian’s terror as it tracks them escaping through a creek, only to be swarmed by a group of men who try to drown them. In the second episode, a group of British plainclothes officers chase and shoot indiscriminately at Brendan “The Dark” Hughes (Anthony Boyle), a Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) officer responsible for planning many of the group’s violent actions, as he sprints through Belfast’s lines of rowhouses and blockaded streets. Later, local PIRA leader Gerry Adams is dragged out of his house, taken to British barracks, and ruthlessly beaten for hours in an attempt to get him to admit to working for the resistance organization. A jazzy cue provides a surreal contrast to scenes of Gerry being sucker punched, slammed into walls, and waterboarded.

Say Nothing needed more scenes like this. The series is so focused on illustrating the PIRA’s increasingly drastic measures that it skimps on both the history needed to fully understand what led to The Troubles and the day-to-day impact of years of conflict in Northern Ireland. This is a story about occupation and what the occupied think is necessary to regain their freedom and dignity. But without an adequate explanation of the why for all this — a thorough counterbalance of what living with an invading force looks like, feels like, and does to your psyche, your priorities, and your perspective on the value of human life — the series feels at best overly narrow, at worst like it’s presenting the PIRA as a group of wayward children who treat murder like a game. All this for one British soldier standing on a corner?

Say Nothing crafts a compelling, detailed narrative of the radicalization and subsequent regrets of Dolours, Marian, Brendan, and Gerry; they serve as avatars for the organization and represent the series’s focus on how it maintained a culture of silence. The show’s key art neatly represents this approach, with an image of Dolours making the same shushing motion that PIRA members in the TV adaptation use to keep people quiet. In reality, though, the 1970s magazine image of Dolours on which the marketing material is based captured her with arms crossed, her gaze cool and unblinking. Changing the picture from one that centers Dolours’s unapologetic affect to one that emphasizes the PIRA’s menace betrays one of Say Nothing’s foundational flaws: The series falters in providing the level of attention and detail applied to its main characters for its depiction of Belfast at large and fails to communicate how living in this kind of environment for generations inspires people to commit themselves to loyalty, subterfuge, and by-any-means-necessary aggression. (Or, as Keefe describes it, “an intoxicating sense of camaraderie and mission, a bond that could seem indestructible.”)

Images of children jumping up and down on burnt-out cars, cheval-de-frise topped with barbed wire, and antagonistic graffiti attempt to convey the constraint and chaos of Belfast at this time. But these spare elements don’t immerse us in the tension of this place or its claustrophobia and oppression; they just feel like props. Older supporting characters who have given years of their lives to the cause lurk on the outskirts of the story, like Dolours and Marian’s Aunt Bridie, who lost her hands and eyes while moving bombs. Her disgust with a TV show where Londoners dance is meant to speak to larger Northern Irish sentiment: “Do they not know there’s a war on?” Yet, these aggrieved observations and secondhand accounts of sacrifice don’t have the same visceral impact of Dolours and Marian’s catastrophic march or The Dark’s frantic flight. They just underscore Say Nothing’s general telling-instead-of-showing imbalance.

Nine episodes isn’t nearly enough time to adapt all of Keefe’s book, but the series omits most of the table-setting he does to explain how both the unionists (mostly Protestant), who thought Northern Ireland should remain under British control, and the nationalists (mostly Catholic), who wanted Northern Ireland to join with the independent south as one united Ireland, considered their ideological fissure unbreachable. The series briefly alludes to the causes of the divide with an opening image of a map of Ireland split into two flags and Dolours narrating, “It used to be that this was our island ’til the British took it off us. The Irish tried to fight them out, but we couldn’t quite finish the job.” Later, she adds that Catholics in Northern Ireland lived in a segregated society where “everything was rigged — jobs, housing, voting rights, it all went to the Protestants.” What these statements don’t fully demonstrate is the existential toll of living under occupation. How did the British harass people on the street, shut down businesses, instill curfews, and operate with impunity? How did they decide which neighborhoods to cordon off, which men to round up, which families to destroy? How difficult was it for Catholics to go to school, find a job, secure a place to live, or vote in this environment, which Keefe describes as one of “extraordinary discrimination” — a system the nationalists perceived as a “caste system akin to the racial discrimination in the United States”?

Say Nothing leaves so much of the British and Protestant aggression Keefe’s book so carefully reconstructs on the cutting-room floor. In 1969’s Battle of the Bogside in Belfast, Protestant gangs burned down Catholic homes and intimidated thousands of Catholics into leaving the city, making them, as Keefe writes, “refugees, waiting for passage on a southbound train to the Republic.” A 1970 attack on Belfast’s Lower Falls saw thousands of British soldiers converge on the neighborhood, crushing a man with one of their armored vehicles before destroying citizens’ houses while ostensibly searching for weapons “with the kind of disproportionately destructive force that would suggest an act of revenge.” The book documents how regular these events were and describes the burden of constantly facing these threats. But in the TV version of Say Nothing, recreations of these kinds of attacks feel atypical because the series doesn’t invest time in capturing the rhythm of living under military rule: how things get simultaneously worse and normalized over time — until eventually, you either become deadened to the infringements you were once shocked by or you take up arms against them.

Say Nothing knows how to convey its main characters’ emotions: In its later timeline, the camera lingers on Dolours’s (Maxine Peake) contrite face as she admits her role in the disappearance of suspected loyalist Jean McConville and centers Brendan’s (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) look of shocked disappointment when Adams (Michael Colgan), years into a successful political career, denies ever being a member of the PIRA. But it fails at surrounding these characters with the historical texture needed to help the audience not just be shocked by their motivations but understand them. The effect is that many of the civilian characters committed to the cause — the neighbors at Divis Flats who try to impress on Jean that “we look after each other here”; the older man who hides Brendan in his home while the British are chasing him; the bartenders at a PIRA-affiliated pub — are all rendered in varying shades of villainy. They appear onscreen either to harass and threaten or regurgitate a blind commitment to a hopeless and increasingly damaging cause; never do they get the kind of interiority that would help Say Nothing feel less blinkered.

This isn’t to suggest that Say Nothing should have endorsed or excused the PIRA’s retaliatory actions. But other series with similar themes of political awakening manage to feel more evenhanded in their approach. Think of the revelatory Ramy episode “Egyptian Cigarettes,” about how the everyday cruelties of life in Palestine can push someone to the brink, or Andor’s finale “Rix Road,” in which the Empire’s presence at a community leader’s funeral signifies its disrespect for the lives destroyed under its tyranny. Derry Girls — the other series about The Troubles directed by Michael Lennox, who helmed four of Say Nothing’s nine installments — was a comedy about a group of teens in the mid-’90s that managed to pack an astonishing amount of commentary and context into each sitcom-length episode.

In the 2018 premiere alone, British soldiers with rifles search school buses at military checkpoints while Catholics who are both sympathetic to Irish liberation and not discuss the impact of a not-yet-detonated explosive on their daily lives (“How long does it take to defuse a fecking bomb?”). A subplot centers an English boy having to attend a girls’ school because of the danger he might face from young Irish men; the episode’s biggest laugh is when he’s forced to urinate in a bucket during detention and an Irish classmate snarks, “That’s English for you. Fucking savages.” The moment plays on nationalist assumptions while also revealing the baseline of how these characters think after showing us several reasons for this mindset. Admittedly, these are all works of fiction, whereas Say Nothing is based on extensive accounts of history. So why not include more of that history? The adaptation is so consumed with the burden of silence that it does a disservice to the burden of occupation.