Claiming a Political Voice
Roger Michell's Titanic Town opens in 1972, a
particularly bitter year in Northern Ireland's
history. The optimism that marked the Northern Ireland
Civil Rights movement's marches to end anti-Catholic
discrimination and demand equal electoral rights in
the late 1960s had already foundered in sectarian
violence. The hostilities between the Protestant and
Catholic communities, exacerbated by the
pro-Protestant sympathies of many in the province's
police force, culminated in the infamous "Battle of
the Bogside" (a Catholic area of Derry), in August,
1969. It prompted James Callaghan, then Britain's Home
Secretary, to dispatch the army to restore order.
Initially welcomed by the beleaguered and outnumbered
Catholic populations, the army lost all
cross-community support in January 1972, when the
soldiers of a British parachute regiment fatally shot
13 civil rights marchers in Derry. "Bloody Sunday,"
for the majority of Catholics, marked the reforming of
the traditional alliance in Irish political life of
Protestants, police, and army against a largely
working-class Catholic community. Michell's film drops
the viewer into the subsequent ruthless struggle
between the British army and the IRA for control of
the Catholic areas of the province, as Bernie
McPhelimy (Julie Walters), a West Belfast housewife,
wakes to Army helicopters above her house and an IRA
gunman on her front step.
In a moment of feisty grandeur, Bernie drives the
gunman step by step back down her front path, only to
find herself and her older children pinioned in the
helicopter's searchlight. For a moment in this early
sequence in the film, the inherent tragedy of daily
life hits the viewer in the face. Lacking any sympathy
for the IRA, the inhabitants of West Belfast are still
the enemy (potential terrorists or harborers of
terrorists) to the British army. Bernie faces a choice
between bowing to the guns of both sides, or
struggling to claim a political voice, free of
nationalist or unionist cant. Much to the
consternation of her family — especially her ailing
and unemployed husband Aidan (Ciaran Hinds), who fears
their deaths at the hands of the IRA, and her socially
sensitive 17-year-old daughter, Annie (Nuala O'Neill),
slowly falling in love with medical student, Dino
(Ciaran McMenamin) — Bernie chooses struggle. Yet she
confronts both the IRA and the Stormont administration
so courageously but so naively that her neighbors
accuse her of betrayal, her children endure
psychological and physical violence, and her husband
collapses from his ulcer and almost dies.
Though the film has maudlin moments worthy of Romance
Channel Classics (the apparently inevitable Irish
domestic-scene-setting rendition of "Danny Boy," the
fairly predictable adolescent love story, and some
mutually-educational mother-daughter exchanges,
particularly in the last scenes of the film), Anne
Devlin's script and Michell's low-key direction (more
reminiscent of his dispassionate work on Persuasion
than his jolly Notting Hill) keep the film rooted in
the earthy, intimate experience of one complex woman
and her frequently terrified family. And while the
story itself is
not at all new (the damage wreaked by an idealist on
those who love her most), the writer and director use
the slow accretion of detail about Bernie in the first
half-hour of the film to give the audience a sense not
only of what Bernie is struggling for, but also the
powerful personal inertia she is struggling against.
She is constantly anxious to create a good impression
and uphold her respectability. As an army raid begins
on her street, she urges her husband to put his
trousers on so he doesn't meet the army "bare-arsed."
When she realizes the soldiers are heading for her
home next, she sends the children upstairs to make the
beds, and is subsequently mortified by the dust the
soldiers find beneath them. A neighbor's loud-mouthed
recitation of 800 years of Irish misery elicits the
complaint that "She's letting the whole street down,"
and when her husband remonstrates, Bernie snaps back
that there's such a thing as "dignified resistance."
The film tracks Bernie's slow awakening in all its
complexity, showing how her desire to maintain a
tenuous personal dignity in the face of an armed
invasion interlocks with the ever-present fear of IRA
retribution. This allows the audience to imagine how
much more attractive it is seems at times, to choose
the route of acquiescence to the status quo of
military occupation, rather than risk the dangers of
individual action.
Fortunately, the film resists the temptation to
romanticize Bernie. All she wants in the beginning is
for the IRA and the soldiers to move their shooting
contests from the daytime to the night so that
children can go to school and housewives finish their
shopping. Peace — in the specific sense of ending the
conflict — isn't on her agenda at all. As media
ambush and interrogation (tactics no different from
those of the IRA or the army) force "peace" on her,
she fumbles, missteps and raises yet more communal ire
along the way. Even when she challenges her fellow
parents at a school awards ceremony with having failed
a generation, the 25,000 signatures for peace she
subsequently collects create a propaganda coup for the
government and also publicly reveal her fear of
condemning the IRA. In such moments, Julie Walters
gives her rawest performance in years, investing
Bernie McPhelimy with the same exhausting honesty she
brought to the role of Angie Todd in Alan's
Bleasdale's television series Boys from the Blackstuff, a biting fictional indictment of the
impact of Thatcherite economics on Britain.
The small miracle of this film is that it isn't
worthy, and therefore isn't dull. It doesn't pretend
to offer solutions; nor does it collapse into didactic
or sanctimonious preaching or reach for the
emotionally appealing shortcut of sentimental
catharsis (as, for example, Some Mother's Son does).
As in Pat O'Connor's 1984 film Cal or Peter
McDougall and John McKenzie's 1975 teleplay Just
Another Saturday, the most important questions are
framed as the contradictions facing the characters,
not the rights and wrongs of any cause, thanks in part
to the filmmaking team's attention to irony and
nuance. Bernie swallows Valium at home, but genteelly
sips tea with the government. While her daughter
worries at home about potential IRA assassination, at
school she's accused of the social sin of "letting
down the Catholics."
The demarcations of dress (the women in matching
pastel suits and hats that "look like Unionists" and
are indubitably middle-class) and accent (only the IRA
speak with the same accents as Bernie and her family,
while politicians, journalists, and broadcasters exude
the clarion confidence of English English) provide a
running gloss on Bernie's odyssey, and the whole is
animated by the writer's fine ear for the wry repartee
of the underdog under fire. As Annie and her
almost-lover Dino walk past Harland and Woolf's empty
shipyard, he tells her how the workers scrawled on the
side of the Titanic, "No Pope here." "Lucky Pope,"
mutters Annie, head down, briskly exiting frame right.
When the ambulance peals for the second time to the
McPhelimy house, the drivers joke they'll need to
erect a sign saying "Accident Black Spot" outside the
house. Even Bernie's attempt to impress on her husband
the power of her support by claiming the Bishop is
right "behind" her misfires when Aidan rouses himself
enough to complain that he'd be a lot happier if the
Bishop were in front of her. Only in the closing
sequences does such wit wither into more
"conventional" wisdom. And by then it's much too late
to sour this quiet, moving film.
