98 min | PG-13 | November 12, 2021 | Focus Features
A boy grows up on a Belfast street in 1969 as his Protestant neighborhood turns into a war zone overnight. The barricades go up. The question is whether the family stays or runs.
Buddy is a nine-year-old boy on a working-class street in Belfast in the late summer of 1969. He plays in the road with a wooden sword and trades sweets and chases a girl from his class. Then a mob storms the street and starts smashing Catholic homes, and the sectarian violence of the Troubles arrives at his front door. Kenneth Branagh builds the film from his own childhood and frames the entire conflict at a child’s eye level. This is not a movie about the politics of Northern Ireland. It is a movie about a family deciding whether to abandon the only place they have ever called home.
Jude Hill plays Buddy with an unforced curiosity that anchors every scene. He watches the adults argue about money and emigration and reads the fear they try to hide. Caitríona Balfe plays Ma as a woman holding the household together while her husband works in England. She makes the financial panic physical, counting coins and dreading the rent man. Jamie Dornan plays Pa with a quiet weariness, a man torn between London wages and Belfast roots. Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds play Granny and Pop with a married shorthand that turns small kitchen exchanges into the warmest material in the film.
Branagh wrote and directed the film, and he shoots it almost entirely in black and white through cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos. The monochrome turns the cramped terraced street into memory rather than reportage. Branagh punches color into the frame only when Buddy goes to the cinema or the theater, so the screen-within-the-screen glows while the real world stays gray. That single trick states the film’s thesis without a line of dialogue. Van Morrison songs carry the soundtrack and push the nostalgia hard, sometimes harder than the scenes underneath them can bear.
The film works best when it stays small and stumbles when it reaches for the grand statement. Branagh trusts his actors and his faces, and the kitchen-table scenes have real weight. He trusts the politics less, sanding the Troubles down into a backdrop for a coming-of-age story. The result is heartfelt and handsomely made and a little too eager to be loved. It is a memory polished until the rough edges are gone, which is exactly how memory tends to work.