Movie Belfast; Movie Tender Bar; Psychology; Psychoanalysis; Memoir; Kenneth Branagh
We watched The Tender Bar, a film directed by George Clooney, a week
ago and then watched Belfast, a film written and directed by Kenneth Branagh, this
week. I was struck by the similarities
between them: both are films based in memoir; each includes terribly well-acted
experiences that occur around and within a boy in the late 1960s/early 1970s (JR
(Daniel Ranieri) on
Long Island and Buddy (Jude
Hill) in Belfast); each boy grows up to be an artist; both boys have a
longing for an absent father that is capably filled by family members – a grandfather
and, to a lesser extent, a grandmother in each, and JR’s uncle in The Tender Bar;
and they are both well-crafted movies following a well-trod path eerily echoing
each other.
While both were satisfying movie watching experiences,
Belfast had an emotional impact that was seismically more profound than that of
The Tender Bar; I was taken aback by the unexpected power of the film, even as
I was watching it. Why, I wondered, is
this film affecting me in this way?
Especially because I found myself being critical of it in advance of
seeing it and also as it unfolded, how could I be so moved by it?
Both movies are disorienting. You don’t quite know who is who in the beginning of each. The voiceover in the Tender Bar introduces the characters and their relationships, but something about the chaotic nature of them – and I think also that Ben Affleck, playing the part of Uncle Charlie Maguire, seemed too clean cut to be as seedy as the character seemed to need to be – and that his performance was such a close reprise of his role in Good Will Hunting that The Tender Bar felt more like a variation on a theme or perhaps déjà vu with prodigious language skills as a substitute for math skills, that it left me a bit disoriented.
Belfast; however – a film about which I only knew that it
was a memoir of Kenneth Branagh’s childhood – took my breath away in the
opening scene and never quite gave it back.
I came into the film expecting to learn how a great light of the English
Stage and Screen learned his craft. I
left with that, but not at all in the way I expected to receive it.
I have always secretly hated Branagh. I think mostly out of envy. Why does he have all this talent? How come he gets to strut and preen on the stage
and screen? It’s ugly of me, I know, but
there’s the truth. Especially when I saw
him in the remake of The Orient Express, a film he directed and starred in; the
grandiosity of his character seemed to reflect the personal grandiosity that I
had sensed emanating from him in perhaps all of his films including his uncut Hamlet
(though I won’t rule out the possibility that I projected it onto him). This is also tinged by my entirely naïve fear
that he imagined himself too pretty for Emma Thompson (and I will state that
this is completely a projection on my part).
So, I was well prepared to dislike this film, and dislike it
I did at the git go. Naïve not just to
Branaugh, I was naïve to Belfast as a historical place. When the camera jumped the wall from present
day Belfast – a small port city with shipbuilding capacity, a modest but
clearly modern skyline, with a certain gritty but likeable exterior to the
Belfast of the late 1960s, portrayed in black and white, with streets so clean
they had to be a movie set and an idyllic neighborhood where everyone knew each
other and was looking out for each other, I thought, “Here we go, this feels
like we’re in the cleaned up New York of the original West Side Story and
Officer Krupke is just around the corner…”
What was just around the corner, of course, was
harrowing. The Troubles emerge and spoil
the idyll. And the tension in the film
revolves around the ways in which the family is torn by its attachment to the
Belfast they have grown up in – articulated most clearly by the boy’s mother Ma
(Caitríona Balfe)
and by Buddy himself – and by the wish to get the hell out – articulated by the
boy’s father, Pa (Jamie
Dornan) who works in England and
comes home only every other weekend and us – the audience – who fear for Buddy’s
(and everybody else’s) life.
One of the differences between the two films is the
personality of the boy at the center of it all.
Each boy has a close relationship with his mother – and, in the absence
of the father (the boy in The Tender Bar’s father is The Voice on your AM dial,
calling out the hits on various New York Radio Stations which JR listens to on
his radio at roughly the same time that Buddy is in Belfast listening to orders
from police through megaphones), each boy gets wisdom, including and especially
about women, from a relative.
It is not clear what JR does with the wisdom he gleans. Unlike in Belfast, we get to see him operate
as young man (played by Tye
Sheridan). Here he can take the
weary worldly wise attitude of uncle Charlie and direct it at the parents of
the girlfriend who has just jilted him in her family home – and he dismisses
her parents as cruelly as she has just dismissed him. But he, like his uncle, can’t seem to take
his own advice and stays stuck in adoring an inconstant lover – a lover as
inconstant as his father has been. His
task – the coming of age that he must achieve – is to harness the powers of
observation that his younger self used to create stories and pursue his art
(writing), rather than to pursue a career (writing) that will impress his
lover.
Let me explain the last sentence in the last paragraph. One of my dear friends from childhood, the
drummer in the band that I played with in High School, is a professional
musician. When he and I met recently for
lunch, we talked and I was impressed with his success (trust me, it is
remarkable). He was lamenting, though,
being a professional musician. He writes
and performs music to meet other’s needs and he is handsomely paid for doing
that. But he is also not free. He envies the busker who opens his guitar
case, plays his songs for whatever people will pay, and plays whatever he
chooses. What he told me was that guy –
the busker – declares himself an artist.
He said, “I, on the other hand, write and play what people tell me too.”
Now, don’t get me wrong.
The author of the book from which the movie was made (JR Moehringer) has to
create stories that his agent and his editor believe will sell (and, I just
discovered, he has earned a Pullitzer for his reporting – so the wish to be an
artist rather than a professional is apparently an unachieved dream). And my friend plays – and plays with – and creates
– music. He is an artist. But the freedom of coming of age – the sense
of owning one’s own destiny (rather than being constantly in debt to bookies,
as Uncle Charlie is, and forever in love with an unloving paramour, as JR
appears to escape from) is the hoped for experience of this movie.
The theme of Belfast, though, is sad rather than
hopeful. While Buddy’s Pa tries to lure
Ma to take the family to Nova Scotia or Perth, Buddy overhears them and
processes what he hears with his grandfather.
Unlike Uncle Charlie’s scattershot advice about managing women, Buddy’s
grandpa has an endearingly romantic notion of what it means to be in love, and
he enacts this with his wife (played fetchingly by Dame Judith Dench), Pa
enacts it with Ma, and Protestant Buddy enacts it in his achingly earnest
courtship of Catherine, the Catholic girl for whom he tries to master maths so
as to be able to earn the seat across from her. To achieve freedom, but more importantly safety, Buddy (and Pa and Ma and his older brother) must leave behind much that they love.
The relationships in Belfast are built on more solid
foundations than those depicted in The Tender Bar. The protagonists in each movie make use of what they are
given as a launching pad that propels them far.
Each takes their own character (Buddy, unlike JR, is not primarily an
observer – he acts – meaning that he emulates his father’s drive to more
actively chart the arc of his life (including by getting caught up in the
troubles in his own 9 year old way) and we know this will take him far and to a place that is consonant with who they are as people.
Perhaps in my harsh judgement of Branagh, I am emulating JR. Invited into Branagh’s home and feeling jilted by my envy of his talent and opportunities, I have chosen to devalue them as JR devalued his girlfriend’s home. Perhaps Branagh’s skill and opportunity rests on a solid foundation that, no matter how idealized it may be in the rosy hues of hindsight, provides him with the pluck of the truly joyful kid whose life has been tempered by learning, all too early, how dear and fragile that joy is and how dependent it is on loving the people in your life. His action, sharing that love with actors on screen - and therefore with those of us who connect with him (when we aren't feeling too much envy), connects us to something essential about who it is that he is - something that all the ugliness of The Troubles and the complications of the roles he has played on stage and screen, and also in life, cannot shake out of him.
