Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Hugo Weaving, James Frecheville, Stephen Rae, Freddie Fox, Barry Keoghan, Moe Dunford, Sarah Greene, Jim Broadbent, Ciaran Grace, Colm Seoighe, Olivier Biwer, Kieran Boland, Antonia Cambell-Hughes, Dermot Rowley, Diarmuid de Faoite, Fiach Kunz, Joe Lydon, Geraldine McAlinden, Aiden McCardle, Liam McEvoy, Keith McErlean.
In the best traditions of the revenge film genre, Black ’47 must surely sit as a truly incredible example of writing, not only in terms of its absorbing, harrowing storyline but in the judgement it passes on the nature of greed and neglect for our neighbours, our souls and what they are worth when we can idly sit by as people die in the streets as the hunger and cold eats away at their resolve and their lives.
If ever there is a case of revenge, the settling of scores, to be considered, it is when you can see with your own eyes the pain inflicted upon a person, a whole group of people, a nation, when the landlords turf a person out into the cold and destroy their home and their lives and blame it on economics, on disease, when in truth, it is all about the pursuit of money and the want to eradicate a swath of people so you can reclaim their land.
Black ’47 utilises with outstanding effect the most devastating time in Irish history, the Famine which saw up to a million people die, and another million leave Ireland forever, at the hands of nature, the church, landowners, and the British government. All because the most staple ingredient of the Irish diet was a humble root vegetable which had overnight become diseased, which saw deaths across Europe, which saw whole villages in Cornwall become deserted but in Ireland, in that country at the Eastern edge of the Atlantic Ocean, the disease took arguably the greatest toll, and it is in this bleak and washed out setting that Black ’47 hits out with particular retribution.
In the most extraordinary and austere of times, a person may either seek good, or be consumed by hate, bad times bring out the hero we desire, the evil in which we must endure. It is only by the twist of fate that we see who inhabits which section of the moral high ground.
In James Frecheville’s returning from the Afghanistan front Connaught Ranger, the stage is set for the most convincing of revenge tropes seen in cinema for quite some time, and certainly on par with Leonardo DiCaprio’s stunning performance in The Revenant and alongside some glorious implementations of the craft from Freddie Fox, Stephen Rae and arguably Hugo Weaving’s finest moment on film as the former highly admired detective Hannah, Black ‘47 is a film of memory, of understanding just how a person can fall when all around him has been taken, it is with little wonder, amazing to think just how restrained we can be when angry, how little we think in the face of the modern day austerity and the homeless situation around us, that revolution is not the answer.
A crowing glory of Irish cinema, a story that should not be forgotten!
Ian D. Hall