In the Name of the Father

From Bono & Gavin Friday's eerie and beautiful song to open the film, this one caught me. I've read recently (thanks to Amy) about how Gerry Conlan and the other people in the film are living. Apparently Gerry is a junkie living a proletariat unemployed depressed existence somewhere in England. This man is a hero and a legend. He is a winner, one of the few, and yet he is destroyed. The comprehensive job that the British police did on him, and the nature of his father's death at the un-bloodied hands of the English system is so overwhelming that it caught up to a man with a bigger victory under his belt than Patton ever had in his most ecstatic dreams. This film captures those days, wherein Gerry Conlan lost his innocence, his father, and his well being (forever gone), and it captures them with style and power.

The music is excellent, and I usually don't like too much pop music in films. It punctuates the film, rather than being used as substance. It provides important context and emotion at the same time. The sadness of this film is offset at times with the gut-heightening surges of pop music. It carries pride and youth with it into the cold dark sickly mature court system of Britain. The crookedness of the cops is without any doubt the most horrible aspect of the whole story, and this film portrays it without cliché or time-tested device. It relies entirely on the story itself, and it succeeds, bountifully.

The regret I feel when I see this film, the empathy and real sorrow, is balanced, actually, by the joy of Gerry's release and the excitement of his very life. The wretched treatment of humanity must soon be part of the past, but we have many generations to go before bigotry is BRED out. Until then, In the Name of the Father will remain an essential piece not only of film history and human history but of all of our personal histories. This film is about all of us in that it exposes our WORST propensities and triumphs along with our fortitude and strength. This is a good film about an exceedingly exceptional true story. Gut and heart-wrenching, simultaneously.