Aubrey MaloneA fitfully engrossing film
Jimmy’s Hall (15A)
On the eve of the Eucharistic Congress in 1932 the Church was rocked by the communistic activities of a Leitrim activist called Jimmy Gralton (Barry Ward), recently returned from exile in America. His charisma and rhetorical prowess caused a groundswell of discontent among otherwise God-fearing Catholics on issues relating to everything from social injustice to creative expression through dance.
Ken Loach ‘s alleged swansong movie once again takes a ‘slice of history’ approach to his material as he dons the apparel of period polemic to tell his story.
It’s excellently directed in the main, as good as any of the better adaptations of works by writers like John McGahern or William Trevor, but from the Church’s point of view it will seem once again like yet another exercise in castigating it for its perceived life-denying qualities, if not its lack of concern for the poorer classes.
After already withstanding Philomena, Calvary and the TV series Quirke earlier this year, such Church-bashing won’t surprise many viewers. What might surprise them is the fact that Loach does give the central priest, Fr Sheridan (Jim Norton) some grudging respect for Gralton in the film’s final stages.
And also that he partners him with a more liberal priest in the younger Fr Seamus (Andrew Scott), the latter priest’s views being more socialist in orientation.
Forced footnote
The film itself carries all the strengths and weaknesses of most of Loach’s work heretofore. There’s a kind of simplistic finger-pointing in its ideology but the time is beautifully caught, giving us the obverse side of Trevor’s ‘ballroom of romance’ in the eponymous hall where Gralton ‘imports’ American dance moves into a pre-Riverdance Ireland.
He takes Irish culture from De Valera’s comely maidens dancing at the crossroads into a hall that doubles as a meeting place for those unhappy with the social ills of the time. These scenes give the film its main heft but in many ways detract from its potency and charm.
When Loach is at his best he lets his stories tell themselves; at his worst he tries to beat his audiences into submission with arguments that are all too easy to make and not nuanced enough to refute.
Sometimes this works, as in his earlier The Wind That Shakes the Barley, but in the present film (a kind of Wind That Shakes the Barley-lite) one can’t help seeing it as a forced footnote to the Civil War saga.
Loach isn’t so much scraping the nationalistic barrel here as presenting us with the left luggage of a country that seems so given to internecine squabbling that it seems to substitute culture for patriotism in some perverse need to cannibalise itself.
So much time is devoted to Gralton’s socio-political struggles (not to mention his religious ones) that there’s precious time left for a personal story. What little there is concerns his love for Oonagh (Simone Kirby), the ‘girl he left behind’ when he fled Ireland in 1922.
Will he be forced to flee it again 10 years on? That’s the main business of a fitfully engrossing film which, with an ounce less point-scoring and an ounce more spontaneity, could have ended Loach’s career on an unprecedented high.
As it stands it’s a compromised success, an affectionate panegyric to a highly-principled broth of a boy who was born perhaps 20 years before his time.
*** Good
