Movie Review: Black ’47

Or just when you think things can’t get grimmer

By Bob Boldt

If you are ever looking for a bleaker Irish travelogue, look no further than Lance Daly’s 2018 Irish period drama film, Black ’47, whose title refers to the most devastating year of the Irish famine, 1847.

    Two of my favorite English-language actors, Jim Broadbent and Stephen Rea, come close, in quite minor parts, to stealing the show for me. Whenever Rea is on the screen, my eyes are drawn to him, because even when he doesn’t have lines and is in the background, he really embodies and informs the scene with his expression. This is one of those things one needs to put on the list of details or treatments that require more than one screening.

It’s almost as though, every time Stephen Rea gets close to center screen, the camera or other characters want to push him to the edge of the screen or into the background. A lot could be written about Rea’s character’s conflicts, being a Judas translator for The Man but, of course, loathing English brutes himself. If the essence of drama is conflict, then Black’47 has it in each character in abundance.
    Jim Broadbent really fills both the character of Lord Kilmichael and the screen with cheery-cheeked noblesse oblige. “I love the Irish countryside,” he says, with all the social consciousness or conscience of the owner of Amazon. Broadbent’s is about the shortest amount of screen time for any major actor in the film. I kind of wanted to see more of him, before he was hanged by the Irish Ranger, character Martin Feeney, but that’s just because I’m selfish. Again, forgive the digression, but Broadbent is one of those actors who somehow can consistently dissolve that fourth wall and actually convince you that you are not watching a performance but an unfolding, real, event. Of course, he’s not the only screen actor who can reach over the popcorn and grab the throat.

    Years ago I had an apotheosis of sorts watching a video of James Broadbent performing a monologue of a retired member of the landed gentry – upper crusted, blue-blooded, and all that rot. It was not a comedy but a man pouring out his soul and conscience while standing in his woods on his estate just talking to an anonymous listener. Going into it I knew I was looking at a performance. But after twenty minutes there was no doubt I was watching an actual British baron, not an actor. The overcoming of my rational consciousness became revealed to me in high relief, as it was literally swept away. I had never experienced the feeling that intensely before. That is the measure of a true actor. If you start to view Black’47 in the hope of a performance anything like that from Broadbent, though, you will be disappointed, although he does pull some great close-ups in his brief appearances.

I didn’t altogether go with the stark contrast the director of photography made between the interiors and the exteriors. I sometimes had the feeling I was moving to a different time or place – something that was not indicated in the plot. This may have been more distracting to me than to others who have seen the film.

In a strange way, I really felt the film could not avoid speaking to us about our own story in a future that will become bleaker and bleaker for us in the coming years. I am a fan of Anglo-Irish films and, except for Peter Watkins’ 1964 docudrama Culloden^*, have not seen the consequences of British brutality so starkly portrayed as in Black ’47, showing as it does Britain’s 19th Century barbarism in “pacifying” the Irish peasants. Of course, Culloden portrays Scotland’s 1746 Battle of Culloden, which resulted in the British Army’s destruction of the Scottish Jacobite rising of 1745 and, in the words of the film’s narrator, “tore apart forever the clan system of the Scottish Highlands.”

    There’s nothing at all original about the plot of Black ’47. From Rambo, to Braveheart, to even the saga of that latter day Odysseus Buford Pusser’s returning home and kicking ass (Walking Tall), the tale of Black ’47 is virtually a genre. What could have been a stereotypical “I’m back!” action picture (there is plenty of action) is transformed by the lead, James Frencheville, as the deserter Connaught Ranger, into a remarkable piece of internal and external gut-wrenching conflict. Both the protagonist and the antagonist were army buddies in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is mentioned another time in the dialogue, planting the closest thing to a red arrow pointing to those 1847 “troubles” being a predecessor of our own. From the death of Athenian democracy, to Rome, and Victoria, from John Quincy Adam’s precautionary, “She goes not abroad monsters to destroy” speech to our own present world domination, every empire who suppresses abroad eventually brings suppression home to its own land.
    A landscape of living and dead corpses rivets the camera’s panning eye with all the impact of a newsreel’s sense of reality. Throughout my viewing I had flashes, future flashes, as if this could be us in ten years. I do not mean to imply that Black ’47 is preaching obvious environmentalism. We can draw that connection all by ourselves. Comparing the effect of the potato famine on the minds of the Irish would not be a bad allegory for the future our children will face. I have been doing a lot of research on global warming for a discussion I will be leading at our Unitarian Universalist discussion in Jefferson City, Missouri, on May 26th, just before our Sunday service. In the essay I did on the topic, I discussed the likelihood of the collapse of civilization in the coming period as well. If our future at its worst won’t end up looking exactly like Black ’47,

Copyright © 1966 Ron Cobb

I’ll eat a spoiled potato, as the saying goes.
    Of course, history knows the unapologetic villain. The Brits have been called “failed Nazis.” But, to my eyes, they gave the underdeveloped world a fucking the Nazis could never match in a half-dozen Reichs. And guess who got to assume the burden, the bloody mantle of Empire when John Bull expired? I think that an environment in ecological collapse affects the psychology of people in profound ways. It nourishes oppressive, psychopathic governments and passive, exploited people who are easily victimized. We are no longer looking in the rear-view mirror here, folks. The only difference is that, in 1847, some Irish escaped to America. In 2047, we will have nowhere to go when the ecology of the planet has been destroyed.

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Copyright © 2019 by Bob Boldt