SOME MOTHER'S SON (46)

Directed by: Terry George

Starring: Helen Mirren, Fionnula Flanagan, John Lynch

The Pitch: The story of the 1981 hunger strike in which ten IRA prisoners died - including charismatic IRA leader Bobby Sands - as seen through the eyes of two of the strikers' mothers.

Theo Sez: A promisingly graceful opening, cutting from a smug Margaret Thatcher equating her Northern Ireland policy with St. Francis of Assisi - "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony" - to a gloriously untamed Irish landscape, a boat chugging across a cove with seabirds cawing overhead ; then the story begins, and things get a lot less graceful. Basically it's a tale of a middle-class woman's political education, in the manner of THE OFFICIAL STORY though with some added subtleties - the point, for example, that murdered British soldiers are also "some mother's son", or the suggestion that our spiky heroine is in the end more admirable than the politicised activists who follow the IRA like sheep (even if, for reasons of class or family, they often have no choice). The trouble is that, though the film coyly hints at such complexities, its agenda is ultimately straightforward - the British slimy and perfidious, Bobby Sands quite explicitly a Christ-like figure. Unlike IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER (in which director George and co-writer Jim Sheridan had swapped roles), no clear distinction is drawn between the IRA's cold-blooded terrorism and ordinary people's anger at oppression and injustice ; at the end of FATHER the hero had clearly, and movingly, transcended mere politics (he was fighting to clear his name, and that of his peace-loving father) but here, once our heroine has converted to the Republican cause, she never really goes against IRA wishes - even at the end, when she opts to save her son, it's only after the terrorists have tried and failed to resolve the situation, and after British mendacity has once again muddied the waters. Above all, though dubious propaganda can be cinematically thrilling (see PRETTY VILLAGE PRETTY FLAME), this shares with Sheridan's film a ragged quality and plodding, TV-movie visuals. Towards the end, when the various factions are all arguing loudly in the same room and our heroine steps back in disgust, the soundtrack turning down their voices to echo her state of mind, you suddenly realise how starved you've been for something vaguely imaginative, and what a long hard slog the movie is ; how headache-inducing, and how far from graceful.