Movie review of 'Omagh'

MOVIE REVIEW OF "OMAGH" SET IN IRELAND

Omagh's early scenes unfold with a dreadful inevitability. In the busy Northern Ireland market town, it's early morning and people are preparing for the day. A school bus pulls up in the High Street, the shops are opening for business and, out in the suburbs, where Mike Gallagher (Gerard McSorley) and his family live, he and his son, Aiden (Paul Kelly), head for the car repair shop where they are to spend the morning working together.

A few hours later, Aiden makes the worst decision of his young life. He takes a break to go into town to buy a pair of jeans.

He will not return home with them. As we know from the film's opening moments, two men have parked a car in the High Street with a 220-kilogram bomb in its boot, and late that night, after a desperate search of the hospitals, Mike Gallagher will learn that Aiden is among the 29 people it has killed.

Omagh was produced and co-written by Paul Greengrass, who outraged conservative opinion in Britain a few years ago with Sunday, Bloody Sunday, his unashamedly partisan re-enactment of the 1972 march in Londonderry, when 13 Irish Catholic protesters were shot dead by British soldiers and another 14 wounded.

In Omagh he takes an equally strong line, etched this time with empathy for the Omagh families, who are still waiting - seven years on - to find out why the bombers who killed their loved ones have never been caught and prosecuted.

Gerard McSorley, who plays Mike Gallagher, has the kind of strong, square face you see on imperial Roman coins - except there's unlikely to have been a Roman emperor as benign. His Gallagher is a big man with a soft voice who has always shied away from conflict until the night he finds himself propelled into the role of spokesman for the Omagh families' group. Their first meeting is about to degenerate into a squabble over who is to blame for the investigation's lack of progress and what to do about it when he steps forward with a few forceful words of good sense and by the end of the evening has been voted president.

The search for answers begins to take over his life, offering consolation and distraction - a way of channelling his grief. His wife, Patsy (Michele Forbes), is not so lucky. Bereavement, the film is sensitive enough to note, takes people in different ways, and for her the ceaseless round of meetings and telephone calls becomes unbearable. She retreats into solitude, feeling she's lost husband as well as son

ANALYSIS OF THE FILM

A terrorist attack occurs and it's revealed that agencies entrusted with the public's safety failed to act upon information that might have prevented the tragedy. No, it's not a movie about Sept. 11, 2001, but rather about Aug. 15, 1998, when a car bombing in the Northern Ireland town of Omagh claimed the lives of some 29 passers-by and injured hundreds of others. A riveting docudrama about that day and its aftermath, "Omagh" serves as a companion piece to writer-producer Paul Greengrass' superb 2001 pic "Bloody Sunday," but emerges as a startlingly powerful achievement in its own right.

Among the most timely and topical of the politically-charged pics unveiled over the past 12 months, no matter that it takes place six years ago, appropriately discomforting pic (winner of Toronto's Discovery award) could nonetheless find a small, but supportive audience in the hands of the right distrib.

The single most devastating act of terror in Northern Ireland history, the Omagh bombing was particularly incomprehensible, coming at a moment when peace in the long-troubled nation at last seemed imminent, thanks to the April 1998 signing of the Good Friday Peace Accords. But at the same time, there existed radical factions (like the fringe group calling itself the Real IRA that would come to take credit for Omagh) intent on continuing the violence.

Much as "Bloody Sunday" created tension by slowly drawing together its two parallel storylines of the Londonderry demonstrators and the military paratroopers charged with their suppression, "Omagh" begins by cutting between the Real IRA members converging on the town and the Omagh denizens going about their daily business. As the bomb is loaded into the back of a sedan and driven to a choice spot on a busy market street, men, women and children shop for blue jeans, sticky buns, etc. Among them is Aiden Gallagher (Paul Kelly), the son of local auto mechanic Michael Gallagher (Gerard McSorley, who himself hails from Omagh), unaware of the lurking danger.

Director Pete Travis maps these scenes out with remarkable verisimilitude and an immersive sense of geography, so that the audience quickly understands the lay of the land. In a mind-boggling snafu, local police are alerted by an informant that a bombing is about to take place, yet end up rerouting Omagh traffic in a way that actually herds pedestrians closer to the location of the bomb.

The explosion turns the streets into an opaque battlefield of carnage, dotted by ramparts of blasted brick and severed limbs -- images that powerfully resemble those of widely broadcast news footage of the event.

Pic shifts to depict the search by family members for news of their loved ones, coming to focus on Michael as he traverses police stations and hospital waiting rooms accompanied by a picture of Aiden.

These scenes are deeply moving on their own terms, and it is impossible to watch them without being reminded of similar quests undertaken by so many in the wake of the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks.

While movies in recent years have given us no shortage of parents' lives upended by the sudden loss of a child, the extraordinary depth of feeling in McSorley's performance causes "Omagh" resonate in a way few such pics have outside of Nanni Moretti's "The Son's Room." From the subtle flecks of pride he shows in an early father-son bonding scene to the way his face drops, like the elastic has been let out of it, at the moment Aiden's death is confirmed, it's a brilliant piece of acting.

"Omagh" then flashes forward two months to address the feelings of abandonment and despair that arise in the town over the police's slack handling of the their investigation.

Finding himself installed as the chairman of a support group for victims families, Michael, throws himself into his own fact-finding mission, arranging meetings with Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, attempting to file a civil suit against the Real IRA and, ultimately, prompting an official review of the matter by the independent police ombudsman (Brenda Fricker).

At this point, a rat's nest of communications breakdowns and cover-ups comes to light. Yet, rather than devolving into one of those narrowly focused, little-people-take-on-the-system movies, "Omagh" remains a potent call for peace and non-violence that casts its eyes far beyond the borders of Northern Ireland.

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