..October 18, 2002

Bloody Sunday
(Paramount Classics) Rated R
Release date: Octobr 4, 2002

Bloody Sunday is a smart, carefully conceived film – literally, on film – that creates the illusion of putting you right into the middle of one of recent history’s most ugly days, the attack by English military on a mostly peaceful Irish march on Sunday, January 30, 1972.  You spend the day, primarily, with Ivan Cooper, a member of Parliament and the organizer of the march.  But Greengrass takes you into the mindset of the other side as well, offering plenty of the blind, self-important attitude that caused the tragedy of the day, but also the more thoughtful, if helpless, faces of men who know that their work is a dark cloud over their brethren. 

James Nesbitt plays Ivan Cooper and its one of those performances that simply “is.”  You don’t see him acting for a second in this film.  If this were a bigger film and didn’t have an accent, he would be a serious Oscar candidate.  But then again, no one looks like they are acting here.  It is raw, intimate tale and the connection with these people becomes quite personal. 

The only problem I have with this movie is that it feels like an incomplete story to me.  How did we get here?  Where are we going to go for the next 30 years?  How can this horror continue in what seems to be a civilized nation for all of these years?  The emotional answers come easily.  But Paul Greengrass seems to be reaching for more than that.  And his only failure is that this myopic vision does not ever feel universal… maybe that’s asking too much.  But it is also the difference between very good and truly great.