A defining moment in Northern Ireland's modern Troubles came on January 30, 1972 when British soldiers opened fire on a civil rights march in Derry, killing 13 and injuring 14 more. Bloody Sunday helped rekindle a decades-long conflict and escalate it into a civil war, driving countless young men to join the IRA.
"Bloody Sunday" tells the story of that day in an unusual 100-minute chronological docudrama that feels like a TV news documentary, with quick cuts, gritty footage and a reliance on hand-held cameras that may cause queasiness in some viewers (it gave this reviewer a bit of a headache).
The film opens as the January 30, 1972 did, with people rising from their beds and greeting the day. Soon, however, civil rights activists are preparing for their march, which they are aiming to keep peaceful. At the same time, British soldiers and police authories appear to be plotting ways to ensure that the day won't end without bloodshed.
We meet Ivan Cooper, an idealistic Protestant civil rights leader firmly entrenched in the Catholic camp and committed to the peaceful change championed by Martin Luther King. There's 17-year-old Catholic rebel Gerry Donaghy who wants to marry his Protestant girlfriend; there's Brigadier Patrick MacLellan, British Army commander in Derry, who feels pressure to prevent the march from even taking place at all. And there's the young solider whose conscience is challenged by what he witnesses that day.
The costumes, the production design ... everything feels extremely realistic and Derry is painted in depressing blues, greys and blacks, making the flowing red blood even more stark.
{INSERT_RELATED}Equally vivid is the humanity captured by a wonderful cast, that includes James Nesbitt who must deliver a wide range of emotion, from outrage to horror to sorrow in rendering Cooper. Declan Duddy, whose 17-year-old ungle Jackie Duddy died on Bloody Sunday in 1972, makes an inspired debut as Gerry Donaghy.
Director Paul Greengrass clearly has something to say here and he says it eloquently and, with the help of Director of Photography Ivan Strasburg, in a hard-hitting fashion. Naysayers will point to Greengrass' pedigree -- he was the first journalist to film the hunger strikes in the Maze Prison -- and say he's unreliable.
Whether or not that's true, "Bloody Sunday" is a powerful, artfully painted picture of a day in modern history that surely ought to live, as the saying goes, in infamy.
"Bloody Sunday" opens Fri., Oct. 25 at Landmark's Downer Theatre.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
