In this fact-inspired chronicle of "the troubles," a college-age boy named Gerard Quigley (Aidan Gillen), having been thrown into Ulster's Maze prison for IRA activity, joins the 1981 hunger strike that resulted in the death of Bobby Sands and nine other young rebels. (In the early '70s, George spent three years in the same prison on an arms charge.) The core of the story is the relationship between Gerard's mother, Kathleen (Helen Mirren), an anti-IRA schoolteacher, and a working-class mother, Annie Higgins (Fionnula Flanagan), whose revulsion for the British is near total. As Annie's son Frank (David O'Hara) and Kathleen's Gerard teeter toward martyrdom, the two women petition and beg the British government to respond to the prisoners' demands and end the strike.
The mothers' affectionate alliance is a marvelous example of the surprising valences in human chemistry. Kathleen is a smart, firm woman in a "soft," equivocating position. Right up to his arrest, Gerard has been able to hide his politics from her. She's horrified at the cold-bloodedness of his self-styled soldiering and mortified when he plants a farewell kiss on her mouth to pass a written message to the Sinn Fein. Annie, on the other hand, wholly supports Frank's actions. She's already lost one son to the struggle, and she's certain that blasting the British off her island will better her lot. Kathleen, educated and worldly, is better able to articulate their sons' plight to British officials, but Annie has the scrappiness and sorority needed for a war of emotional attrition. As the turbulence behind bars runs its terrifying course, the audience, like Kathleen, gets caught up in the fervor of Annie's firebrand solidarity.
George's stirring depiction of the prisoners' revolt obscures the film's key idea: that destruction or self-destruction inevitably cripples a movement. The IRA inmates protest because they want to be recognized as prisoners of war, not criminals. The most critical of their five demands is the most purely symbolic: the right to wear their own clothes. George questions whether acquiring such a right is worth risking lives. But his reenactments of the turmoil in and around Maze prison is so mind-grabbing and electric that a rift develops between what the movie states explicitly and what it dramatizes.
George has said that the film is about the anguish of people squeezed between two extremes: the institutional violence of the British, and the mystical revolutionary violence of the IRA. It plays out, though, as a battle between a liberal Kathleen and the radicals and reactionaries around her. In art, as in politics, the liberal perspective is difficult to make dramatic and appealing. Kathleen's looking askance at the rebels' courtroom grandstanding isn't as gut-warming as Annie's mouthing off to every authority figure in sight, whether the security forces or a nun. Early on, there's a barbed critique of Irish manly charm in Gerard's deception and manipulation of his mother Kathleen. But George never rises to the full-blooded analysis of Irish machismo that informed In the Name of the Father (which he and Sheridan also co-wrote, with Sheridan directing).
Still, impact emerges from the zigs and zags. In the opening minutes, George inter-cuts the girls in Kathleen's school pounding their way through a step dance and Gerard and Frank targeting British military vehicles with a bazooka; the sequence culminates with classroom windows shattering and a Jeep and truck exploding into flames. Of course, the cutting baldly points up the cruel disruption of the peaceful school by the guerrilla war beyond its gates. But George also gets at something more mysterious--the percussive, fatalistic nationalism shared by almost every major character except Kathleen. In another suggestive bit of cutting, George moves from the mothers crooning American pop standards to the prisoners joining arms and voices and drumming on walls.
At those times, the film has an atavistic charge that's rooted in real events. When the prison guards won't pick up the inmates' slops unless they take off their makeshift blanket robes and put on their convict uniforms, the men smear their feces on the walls and keep up their regimen of exercise and Gaelic pride. This isn't hyperbole, it's history; if anything, George is downplaying their blend of low-down grit and high-grade nationalism in order to sustain his dramatic credibility. In The Troubles (Roberts Rinehart, 1996), Tim Pat Coogan writes that during this episode, "The Irish demonstrated both their defiant natures and their sense of identity in a manner which gave new meaning to the term 'back to basics.'" They continued to hold Irish classes by tapping out a word on the heating pipes and then inscribing it on their cell walls in their own excrement, Coogan writes, "sometimes using the crucifixes on their rosary beads as stylos." George's audience viscerally experiences the IRA men using patriotic and religious fervor to jack themselves up into a transcendental state. When Gerard first lands in Bobby Sands' prison cell and tells him he looks like Jesus, it sounds like an air-clearing quip; when Sands lies dying of starvation, just after being elected to Parliament, it's no joke.
Flanagan is fabulous as the proletariat mom. She alchemizes small and big bits of business into a performance bubbling with fresh folk legendry and humor: At her peak, she refuses to sit beneath a portrait of the Queen hanging on a pub's wall. Ruddy, freckled and on the strong side of stout, she's like a gorgeous, weathered swath of Irish landscape. And Mirren, though she starts as tentatively as the character herself, gains authority as the film develops. When Gerard lies exhausted in his hospital bed, Kathleen won't crack and condone his politics to give him comfort. Nor will she relinquish her parental rights: Her intransigence saves him. She and Flanagan have a heart-rending breakthrough when Kathleen emerges shaken and crying from the prison after Gerard takes up the hunger strike. With a flash flood of empathy washing away past resentments, Annie urges Kathleen to get a grip in front of the prison personnel--before she collapses into tears herself. The movie is about the need to preserve life without betraying comrades. Mirren is the one who finally clarifies that theme amid George's depictions of the men nattering over bargaining points. She brings the film the gift of a fine-grained consciousness.
Some Mother's Son
Directed by Terry George.
Rated