Movie Review: Paul Greengrass's United 93: Guts - Page 4

Greengrass and his cinematographer Ivan Strasburg shoot as if it were all happening before us, and the confusion of the leaders of the march, including Ivan Cooper, MP (James Nesbitt) and Bernadette Devlin (Mary Moulds), after the troops have replaced rubber bullets with lead and started picking people off is vividly realized. Because the cinematography lacks the usual finish and polish, you may feel an almost unmediated horror, as if the theater had dissolved and you were there, unprotected, in the street.

Perhaps because Bloody Sunday is so rooted in place, it feels even more teeming than United 93, in which all the relationships are transient. Greengrass shows us five elements: Cooper, a grassroots politician, and his organization working to keep the IRA and the unorganized, disgruntled youths from disrupting the peaceful protest; the British military leader who wants a muscular show of force that will function both as payback for past attacks on British soldiers and as a deterrent against future attacks; a local policeman who works with a sympathetic British officer to keep a check on this show of force; edgy, angry British soldiers who are spoiling for blood and who pressure a more restrained comrade to go along with them; and a young Catholic lad with a Protestant girlfriend who joins his rock-throwing mates and draws fire.

All the same, there's more of a point to Bloody Sunday than to United 93, which aims simply to depict for us our own fearful imaginings. And the point is pretty much unifaceted: at a press conference after the massacre, a shaken Cooper tells the British authorities that they have destroyed the non-violent movement and done more effective recruiting for the IRA than the IRA could ever have done on its own. Greengrass goes on to make clear that the British military planned the attack as a demonstration, planted nail bombs on a corpse, and consistently lied about their actions to Lord Widgery's Tribunal, which investigated the incident and published its Report in 1972. But though Greengrass is angry, he's not seething. His live-action visual technique and editing have a paradoxical sense of containment: "anything" could happen, provided it fits the plan.

It should also be said that the points Greengrass makes in Bloody Sunday are not controversial and so his treatment doesn't need to be polemical. (Compare, for instance, David McKittrick and David McVea's chapter "The End of Stormont, 1972-73," from Making Sense of the Troubles (2000): "What happened on that day was to drive even more men and youths into paramilitary groups.") Even though there may be reason to despair of the situation in Northern Ireland, as this 21 August 2005 New Republic article by Ron DePasquale suggests, that's a different question from what happened in Derry three decades ago. (A second commission of inquiry was established in 1998, though it seems not to have published its findings yet.) By temperament Greengrass seeks to form consensus not to rouse the rabble; I don't believe he intended to make an incendiary point, as Gillo Pontecorvo did with The Battle of Algiers (1966), and as he might have done had he made Bloody Sunday 30 years earlier. (Or even 20 years earlier, at the time of the 1981 Hunger Strike in which Bobby Sands and nine other male prisoners died.)

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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