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****/**** starring James Nesbitt, Tim Pigott-Smith, Nicholas Farrell, Gerard McSorley screenplay by Paul Greengrass, based on the novel Eyewitness Bloody Sunday by Don Mullan directed by Paul Greengrass
by Walter Chaw With a fade-out/fade-in editing style that pulses like quickening breath, Paul Greengrass's harrowing, documentary-style recreation of the January 1972 Derry Massacre–immortalized in U2's song ("Sunday, Bloody Sunday") and about 30 years ("centuries" seems more appropriate) of violence between Irish separatists and the British army–is thick with an oppressive sense of inevitability. As Greengrass moves between the British troops readying for war and well-meaning Irish activist Ivan Cooper (James Nesbitt) stumping for a peaceful demonstration, the anger of the British paramilitary ("We've lost forty-three men in the last few weeks") and the frustration of the Irish demonstrators gel into something like a coherent portrait of a violent legacy swelling into flashpoint. Greengrass's approach is unfailingly naturalistic, from performances that astonish for their transparency to the grittiness of his 35mm eye. It's hard to imagine a better document of the fog of war, the tension of a maddening crowd mustering for riot, and the impossibility of a "peaceful demonstration" in an ideological war. Bloody Sunday is transporting and educational (not merely from a strictly historical standpoint, but from an anthropological perspective as well), and Greengrass is a major talent to watch. Though proximate explanations for what happened that day are maddeningly elusive, what remains is as clear an explanation as any of how a tinderbox sometimes erupts into conflagration with nothing so much as a strike.
