Butler's Cinema Scene

James Frecheville

“BLACK 47” My rating: B

96 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The story arc of “Black ’47” will be familiar to anyone who’s seen a Western about a posse in pursuit of a wiley outlaw (or Apache).

What makes the film special is the setting.

Lance Daly’s movie unfolds in Ireland during the potato famine, a situation rarely if ever depicted in the movies. While the film’s dramatic tropes follow an expected trajectory, the background against which the action plays out — and which informs the film with a moral imperative — becomes a character in its own right.

In 1847 army deserter Martin Feeney (James Frecheville) arrives in his Connemara birthplace after a long journey from India. He finds a land wracked by starvation after the failure of the potato crop. Dead bodies lie by the roadsides. Virtually everyone is a shoeless beggar.

He discovers that his mother has died and his brother has been executed by the British, and he tries to intervene in the eviction of his widowed sister-in-law and her children, who promptly freeze to death.

Arrested by the local constables, Feeney slaughters a half dozen officers in their own station house, then goes on to kill the judge who hanged his brother, behead the land agent who initiated the eviction, and destroy a revival tent where Protestant missionaries offer soup to the dying…providing they give up Roman Catholicism.

Hugo Weaving, Freddie Foxx

The alarmed authorities organize a party to capture/kill this vengeful marauder.  Leading the group is Captain Pope (Freddie Foxx), young officer who, like most of his fellows, regards starvation as a just outcome for a people perennially soaked in alcohol.

He’s accompanied by Hannah (Hugo Weaving), a constable facing a death sentence for killing a prisoner with his bare hands. Hannah becomes the moral center of the  yarn…he’s Irish but has lived mostly as an Englishman — in fact he served with Feeney in Afghanistan — and is torn between service to his British masters and the country that gave him life.

The party is rounded out by a soft-hearted private (Barry Keoghan) and a sardonic  civilian (Stephen Rea) who serves as a translator between the British and their Gaelic-speaking subjects.

Daly’s screenplay is a long, bloody chase as Feeney makes his way ever closer to the estate of the rich Lord Kilmichael (Jim Broadbent) on whose property all these horrors are unfolding. Broadbent delights in playing the coolly callous aristocrat, who observes that “This potato matter has simplified things considerably.”

One of the curious aspects of “Black ’47” is that Feeney, the avenger, has almost no personality. He’s portrayed by Frecheville as a sort of  human mountain whose outward stoicism is belied only by the intensity of his burning gaze.

The film’s true star is Weaving’s Hannah, whose slow transition from British tool to Fenian fury provides an emotional arc to match that of the gut-punch action.

Along the way “Black ’47” depicts one of the darkest and most reprehensible periods of British history. Bastards, indeed.

| Robert W. Butler