Hemingway once said that if he defined what truly happened in action, he would have accomplished something great. That same spirit seems to have animated Paul Greengrass who, in "Bloody Sunday," has re-created the events of Jan. 30, 1972, with what appears to be an action novelist's commitment to reality – he puts you there, in the thing, in its swirling heart, and you know only what the participants know, and you see how hard it was to make any sense of it.
For that is the day when soldiers of Britain's elite 1st Parachute Regiment opened fire on a Londonderry peace march in Northern Ireland, and killed 13 in half an hour.
Simon Mann, center, as a colonel in the British force that fired on a Londonderry crowd.
(Bernard Walsh)
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Greengrass is a specialist in a relatively rare genre that has been called "mockumentary"; he attempts to achieve a feeling of utter reality by using the conventions of newsreel filming as applied to re-creations of events. It's something that Orson Welles thought of first, in segments of "Citizen Kane," and reached its apotheosis in Peter Watkins's "Culloden," which re-created an 18th-century battle as if it were covered by the BBC. Three years ago, "The Blair Witch Project" brought the same approach to horror materials.
There are great advantages to such an approach, but also drawbacks: It lacks a level of introspection or analysis. Instead, like newsreel coverage, it shows only what can be seen, not what can be thought or felt. It can't speculate on motive or truth, but only re-create the structure and feel of events. But while I am no expert on these troubles or this particular vision of them, Greengrass's effort feels authentic. He's no conspiracy theorist; he's more a reality theorist.
In his view, the British troopers were unhinged by the visit of a general, poor communication, confusion among the marchers (who frequently deviated from the agreed-upon parade route) and the vicious attacks of hooligans who rained rocks on the soldiers whenever possible. You can say that no man with a self-loading rifle should shoot a boy who's just hit him in the head with a rock; however, that is a much easier position to adhere to if you have never been hit in the head with a rock.
The movie is set up as a day in the death of Derry. It opens that morning, intimately, with a glimpse of two young lovers in an apartment, and we presume what they do not: that this day will change or end their lives. From that closeness, it voyages outward to the institutions involved – a civil rights coalition protesting a new British program of internment for suspected IRA members, and the army, like all armies, a suffocating crowd of office-bound know-it-alls and in-the-field know-nothings.
The camera floats and drifts, wandering into meetings among the marchers as they argue over routes and worry themselves about the hooligans, and then into the army command post where spiffy Maj. Gen. Ford (Tim Pigott-Smith) is wandering about telling everybody to go on as if he's not there, which is of course impossible. Finally, it wanders to the smock-wearing troops out in the alleys behind their armored personnel carriers, who had been instructed to be especially aggressive in rounding up the hooligans who haunted the fringes of these kinds of things.
Who was to blame? The Brits thought nobody and exonerated the 21 soldiers who fired the 108 bullets; tut-tut, just one of those things, old man. Yet the Irish hated the British for it, and enrollment in the IRA swelled enormously; the event probably prolonged the killing.
These events, of course, will be more familiar to the English and the Irish; we have our own version, in Kent State, still to figure out. But as a terrifying example of what can happen when too many angry people are crowded into too small a space, it's a gripper.
BLOODY SUNDAY (R, 107 minutes) – Contains realistic violence and gore. At the Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle and Shirlington.
