Until watching Kenneth Branagh’s wistfully autobiographical “Belfast,” I don’t think I realized that one of Britain’s greatest living actors — a talent who’s embodied everything from Henry V to Hercule Poirot, Kurt Wallander to Laurence Olivier — had been born in Northern Ireland.
Maybe that’s because his family got out and moved to Reading, England, when he was 9 years old, just as the Troubles were coming to a boil, an escape that spared him the accent and what could have been a premature end.That strategy makes it easy to guess on which side of the nationalist divide the Branaghs found themselves.
Though the conflict has been depicted to the point of exhaustion on-screen — typically as an escalating cycle of senseless brutality, complete with preachy “violence begets violence” sermon — “Belfast” avoids many of the clichés in favor of a sentimental look back through a child’s eyes.
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