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Bloody Sunday, written and directed by Paul Greengrass,
is the most visceral and cumulatively powerful account of civil
war since Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers. It takes
place from dawn to dusk on January 30, 1972, when British soldiers,
under orders to make mass arrests, shot 27 unarmed demonstrators,
13 of them fatally, as they were taking part in what was intended
to be a peaceful, large-scale civil-rights march in Derry, Northern
Ireland, to protest the British policy of internment without trial.
None of the British soldiers involved was ever disciplined; on the
contrary, there were decorations from the queen. The massacre ended
any hope for a nonviolent resolution of "the troubles" and rejuvenated
the IRA.
Greengrass presents a multitude of mini-dramas from all sides of
the conflict. His approach is furiously egalitarian; he wants to
make it clear that, in the long term, the events of Bloody Sunday
were tragic for British and Irish alike. Inevitably, the film focuses
on Ivan Cooper (played extraordinarily well by James Nesbitt), the
middle-class Protestant manager of a shirt factory who founded the
biggest Catholic political party in Northern Ireland and whose hero
was Martin Luther King. Cooper led the march that day. His worst
fears are confirmed the instant he realizes the bullets being fired
are not rubber but lead. He begins the film as a festive, harried
gladhander, the archetypal Irish pol, and ends up broken. Still
alive today, he never marched again.
Shooting mostly with handheld cameras, Greengrass keeps the action
so vivid that at times it's difficult to believe you're watching
a staged re-creation. (Family members of the dead and wounded as
well as ex–British soldiers from the paramilitary forces were used
as extras.) The depth and range of the film's characterizations,
its comprehension of grief, carry it well beyond the standard successes
of the semi-documentary format. The primitive force of this film
seems to bubble up from the vast collective memory of the combatants.
It's like watching a nightmare made flesh. (1 hr. 50 mins.; R) —
PETER RAINER
Opens October 4
• Showtimes
& tickets (movietickets.com)
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