For a political thriller, Shadow Dancer contains very few obvious thrills. About a Belfast family targeted by the British intelligence agency MI6 during the last months of the Struggles, it contains no sex scenes, few laughs, only a handful of chase scenes, and no clear-cut good guys. And despite the fact that this Belfast was actually shot in Dublin, it is a study in institutional drab rather than the rolling green we Americans tend to expect from our Irish movies.
Andrea Riseborough stars as Collette McVeigh, a single mother whose little brother was killed in a bombing when she was a kid. Now she and her remaining brothers—Connor (Domhnall Gleeson) and Gery (Aiden Gillen, best known to Wire fans as Mayor Carcetti)—avenge his memory by fighting for the IRA. Central to this film is the varying degrees to which she, her brothers, and mother can rationalize their actions, and the dangerous family tensions that result. Those tensions are put to the test when Collette is caught by MI6 agent Mac (Clive Owen, at his beleaguered best) and becomes a double agent so she can remain with her son.
This a film whose strength is its weakness: a restraint that at time devolves into a lazy ambiguity, albeit one offering unique, and very timely, insight into the queasy marriage of blood ties and radical politics. The issue at hand may be the conflict between the Republicans and Loyalists in Northern Ireland, but insights offered by this film apply to the recent bombings in Boston by the Tsarnaev brothers. Continue Reading →