'Till' is a mandatory movie for our times

 By Tom Siebert

I went to school for sixteen years and was never taught about Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old black youth whose brutal murder by white supremacists in 1955 added angst and urgency to the Civil Rights Movement.

So thank you, Chinonye Chukwu, for making Till, an agonizing but exceedingly sensitive film that is going to be seen by millions and win many awards, all the while memorializing this American tragedy.

In the upbeat opening sequences of the movie, Emmett (portrayed by charismatic newcomer Jalyn Hall) is a high-spirited, likeable lad who lives with his mother Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler in a tour de force performance) on the second floor of a two-flat apartment on the South Side of Chicago.

He and his doting mom joke, banter, exchange smiles, and sing doo-wop and bee-bop tunes in imperfect harmony. Writer/director Chukwu films the fun in vibrant colors, from the bright dresses that Mamie wears to the wallpaper in Emmett’s bedroom, illustrated with tiny boats, planes, and trains.

Exuberant Emmett, whose nickname is “Bobo,” is excited about the rail trip that he will soon be taking to visit relatives in Money, Mississippi. But Mamie is overcome with dread over his looming journey into the segregated Deep South.

“I don’t want him seeing himself the way people see him down there,” she tells her mother––Emmett’s grandmother––Alma (Whoopi Goldberg, who co-produced the film). “They have a different set of rules for Negroes.”

And to her big-personality son, Mamie Till directly warns: “Be small down there!”

At the train station, mother and child engage in a long tight embrace, a scene made painfully poignant by the audience’s knowledge that the lingering hug will be their last one.

During the 700-mile ride from Illinois to Mississippi, Emmett looks optimistically through a train window, his future as seemingly wide open as the sweeping scenery.

In the small town of Money, he stays in a shotgun shack owned by his great-uncle Moses Wright, a sharecropper, and reconnects with his cousins.

Then, on August 24, after a long day of picking cotton with his relatives, comes Emmett’s much-disputed interaction with shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant while purchasing bubble gum.

“You look like a movie star,” Emmett tells Carolyn, 21. And as he leaves Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, he turns around and whistles at her. She goes to get a gun and points it at the car that Emmett and his extended family are departing in.

Four days later, Carolyn's husband Roy and her half-brother J.W. Milam abduct Emmett at gunpoint from Moses’s home. Then, in an awful scene heard––but mercifully not shown––they beat the youth, shoot him in the head, and tie a 75-pound cotton gin belt around his neck with barbed wire.

Emmett’s bloated and mutilated body was discovered two days later in the Tallahatchee River. And when Mamie is notified via phone call that her beloved son is dead, she collapses in trauma.

The grief-stricken mother somehow gains enough strength to travel to Mississippi, identify her grotesquely disfigured son, and pay $3,400 to have his swollen, badly bruised body shipped back to Chicago.

Then Mamie decides to turn her pain into purpose. She chooses to hold a public funeral with an open casket and allows Jet magazine to photograph Emmett's face. The disturbing cover photo shocked the conscience of Americans and people around the world.

But apparently not the jury of twelve white men in the trial of Bryant, 24, and Milam, 35. Both men were found not guilty in Tallahatchee County Court on September 23, 1955, despite Mamie’s courageous testimony describing her son's corpse.

However, in a Look magazine article published on January 24, 1956, the acquitted duo brazenly admitted in ghastly detail how they killed Emmett Till. Protected by the double jeopardy clause in the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Bryant and Milam could not be retried.

Meanwhile, civil rights leaders Medgar Evers and Dr. T.R.M. Howard reached out to Mamie and she became a social justice proponent. National sympathy over the gruesome killing contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

On June 12, 1963, Evers, who led the effort to permit blacks to vote in Mississippi, was gunned down outside his Jackson home by Byron De La Beckwith, a Ku Klux Klan member. Medgar’s wife Myrlie and their three young children watched the murder take place.

Emmett’s mother remarried, becoming known as Mamie Till-Mobley, earned a master’s degree in education from Loyola University, and served as an elementary school teacher.

On January 6, 2003, she died of heart failure at the age of 81 and was later buried near her son at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, a suburb southwest of Chicago. Mamie’s monument reads, "Her pain united a nation."

In August 2017, a Mississippi grand jury opted not to charge Carolyn Bryant Donham, then 82, with perjury for allegedly exaggerating her testimony in the infamous trial of her husband and half-brother.

And earlier this year, on March 29, 2022, President Joe Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, making it a federal hate crime when two or more people conspire to kill or harm someone because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or other prejudices.

Still, white supremacy remains the “most persistent and lethal threat” to the United States, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Martin Luther King, Jr., who was assassinated on April 4, 1968, famously said: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

Till is a must-see movie that will hopefully bend our country’s moral arc closer to a more just society.

 

New book about Yoko Ono reveals her genius, gravitas, and greatness

By Tom Siebert

When Yoko Ono was reluctantly thrust onto the global stage in the late 1960s, she was called “ugly,” a “screamer,” and the “dragon lady” who broke up The Beatles.

More than five decades later, winsome writer Madeline Bocaro sets the record forever straight in the epic, vividly detailed book, In Your Mind: The Infinite Universe of Yoko Ono, revealing John Lennon’s otherworldly half as a beautiful woman who could sing pretty songs, and on the contrary, wanted the Fab Four to stay together.

I was ready to read a 558-page book about Yoko after recently re-listening to 1980’s Double Fantasy and realizing that her seven songs on the Grammy-winning album were better than John’s seven, as she brilliantly reached into rock, new wave, American folk, Eddie Cantor, and Marlene Dietrich music.

I learned from Ms. Bocaro’s book that Ms. Ono’s musical skills were developed growing up in an aristocratic Japanese family, learning piano at the age of four, and later studying at prestigious Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York.

Moreover, Mr. Lennon was not the first Beatle whom Yoko met. In the fall of 1966, she approached Paul McCartney on behalf of John Cage, asking if the avant-garde composer could use some of the song-writing duo’s lyrics for a book of music manuscripts.

Paul referred her to John, who a few weeks later, on Nov. 7, coincidentally walked into a London art gallery where Yoko was preparing an exhibit of her conceptual works. One of those art pieces was a ladder, which Mr. Lennon climbed atop and gazed into a magnifying glass pointed at the ceiling, where a small white canvas had the word “YES” written on it.

He was impressed with the positive message as well as the messenger, and within less than three years, on March 20, 1969, they were married, instantly becoming the most famous couple on the planet.

The multimedia crush was, well, crushing, and inspired them to hold a honeymoon “bed-in” at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel to protest the then-raging Vietnam War.

“Their lives were not their own,” Ms. Bocaro writes. “John and Yoko were messengers, using fame as a tool to promote peace and to give us hope.”

The horror and haunt of war had shaped each other’s world vision. John grew up playing in the Liverpudlian rubble of World War II, while Yoko’s family sheltered in a bunker during the apocalyptic firebombing of Tokyo in 1945.

The once-wealthy family faced starvation and was forced to beg for food, a circumstance that first fired her artistic imagination.

“The painting method derives from as far back as the time of the Second World War when we had no food to eat, and my brother and I exchanged menus in the air,” Yoko stated in an art catalogue from that fateful 1966 exhibit in London.

In Your Mind: The Infinite Universe of Yoko Ono also includes meticulously dated and described entries about her books, poetry, films, concerts, songs, albums, and recording sessions, in addition to pulled quotes from media articles and excerpts from the author’s own interviews.

Ms. Bocaro was smart in using real-time quotes in her book, rather than new interviews in which memories are faded, resentments are reconciled, and facts are reimagined.

The screaming, for instance, was not imagined. It stemmed from Ms. Ono’s childhood, when she became aware of the power of a woman’s voice and curious about her mother’s warning not to ever go near the family’s servants’ rooms.

But young Yoko went anyway, only to hear a conversation between two teenage girls, one of whose aunt had given birth the previous day, and she was describing the sounds women make when having a baby.

“There was a totally sanitized image about a woman, you know, they were supposed to be just pretty and make pretty noises,” Ms. Ono told The Guardian, a British daily newspaper, in 2016. “So I was scared, and I sneaked back to my room, but that really stayed with me. And years later, I started to create all sorts of sounds.”

Those sounds, while disturbing to some, reflected her feelings as a “disrespected woman,” Ms. Bocaro comments below that passage in her book, adding that Yoko then “began to carry the torch for the plight of all women.”

Popular music fans, who had grown accustomed to Mr. Lennon’s serrated singing voice, were introduced to the screaming stylings of Ms. Ono on “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow),” a song about her daughter, who was absconded by second husband Tony Cox, on the Live Peace in Toronto 1969 album.

Klaus Voorman, a longtime friend of John’s who played bass guitar at that concert as a member of the Plastic Ono Band, provides the book’s most trenchant quote about the fabled couple’s relationship.

“Up to the time Yoko came into the picture, John, even with all his success and money, was a frustrated, helpless creature,” said Mr. Voorman, who created the iconic cover of The Beatles’ Revolver album in 1966. “When Yoko appeared, he bloomed. It was an amazing thing to see. For him, that was the revolution.”

Indeed, Ms. Ono inspired Mr. Lennon to become a more visionary songwriter, pioneering male feminist, and fervent proponent of peace.

Critics of her music may be surprised to learn that she has had thirteen number one singles on the U.S. Billboard charts, influencing such artists as Pete Townshend, Elvis Costello, the B-52’s, Sonic Youth, and Meredith Monk.

On Dec. 9, 1980, John Lennon was shot to death by a deranged fan, as the couple were walking toward the entrance of their apartment home in the storied Dakota building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Since Mr. Lennon’s still-shocking death, Yoko, along with her son Sean and his stepbrother Julian, have preserved John’s music, messages, and legacy. She also has quietly given away millions of dollars to charities, hospitals, art museums, peace groups, environmental causes, and just friends in need.

The artwork of Ms. Ono, now 89, is still exhibited throughout the world. Her music still fills the global airwaves. And her Twitter feed is a proverbial daily devotional, from which Ms. Bocaro quotes generously in her magnificent book:

“Your fear is protecting you…There are no brick walls…Start with feeling love for the problem. You will then know what step you wish to take…Waves always return…No cloud can cloud us forever…Water is more valuable than gold…The child in you will save you…The light that shines on everything shines on you, too… Silence is the highest form of expression.”

John Lennon was anything but silent about his wife’s creative talent, saying she was as gifted as Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan “rolled into one.”

Ms. Ono remains an inspiration to anyone who has experienced foolish prejudice, unfair criticism, or unspeakable tragedy.

As Madeline Bocaro eloquently concludes: "Yoko is like a polished gemstone––radiating after years of abrasion."

 

Actor Edward James Olmos stands and delivers at Judson University in Elgin, Illinois

 

By Tom Siebert

Pioneering actor Edward James Olmos shared his intriguing takes on God and country, in addition to giving a well-received shout-out to Chicago’s baseball teams at the Inspirational Series of the World Leaders Forum at Judson University in Elgin on Monday night.

“Everyone knows God is a woman,” Olmos told the Christian college audience of about 400, many of whom smiled, laughed, and even clapped. “And Jesus is not white. He is from the Mediterranean.”

The Miami Vice and Stand and Deliver star did not shy away from another taboo topic, politics, saying that the United States is deeply divided over the false claim that President Joe Biden was not duly elected in November 2020.

“When the civil war comes, it will pass, so just go inside like you did during the pandemic­­––get some food and watch Battlestar Gallactica,” he joked, referring to the rebooted television series in which he played Commander William Adama from 2003 to 2009.

The charismatic actor talked about the heavy subjects with a light touch. But most of his hour-long storytelling traced his life from boyhood baseball player to teenage rock singer to actor, director, and producer who shattered stereotypes of Mexican Americans in plays, movies, and TV shows.

Olmos became famous portraying El Pachuco, narrator of the musical play and later movie Zoot Suit in 1981. From 1984 to 1989, he was the somber Lieutenant Marty Castillo in the mega-hit Miami Vice, winning both an Emmy and Golden Globe for the complex role.

Also in 1989, Olmos became the first and only American-born Latino to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, after starring in Stand and Deliver as Jaime Escalante, an East Los Angeles high school teacher who successfully taught advanced calculus to at-risk Hispanic students.

“There’s no one more important than a teacher,” Olmos told the diverse crowd of staff, students, elected officials, and community members at Judson’s Herrick Chapel.

Wearing a matching black shirt and suit, he pulled up his pant legs, only to reveal socks bearing the blue and white logo of the Los Angeles Dodgers, in whose farm system he once played. “I know that here I should be saying Chicago Cubs! White Sox!”

Olmos, 75, has long been a peace and social justice advocate. In 1988, he joined United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez to protest the poisonous effects of pesticides on California grape pickers and their families.

And in the aftermath of Rodney King’s brutal beating by Los Angeles police officers in 1992, Olmos took a broom to help clean up riot-ravaged neighborhoods in the South Central section of the city.

At Judson, the actor/activist lamented the lack of jobs for Latinos in Hollywood and the overall increase of prejudice toward Mexicans in America.

“The last five years have been very difficult for us,” Olmos told the hushed audience, which was well-represented by those of Hispanic heritage. “We have to do better.”

Later joining host Jacqueline Ruiz and Olmos on the stage was Rick Najera, an award-winning sketch comedian and playwright.

Najera, a protégé of Olmos who was recovering from his third brain surgery, was presented with the 2022 Communion Champion award for “igniting the flame of inspiration.”

The event marked the resumption of the Inspirational Series part of Judson’s globally known World Leaders Forum after a five-year break.

Previous speakers in the series have been magician Jim Munroe in 2017; Olympic gymnast champion Mary Lou Retton in 2016; and in 2015, evangelist Nick Vujicic, who was born without limbs.

From 2010 to 2021, Judson’s World Leaders Forum has featured former President George W. Bush; ex-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice; former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev; ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair; former Mexican President Felipe Calderón; Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan; Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank host Mark Cuban; author, attorney, and diplomat Caroline Kennedy; former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich; ex-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean; and actor Terrence Howard.

Located in northwest suburban Elgin since 1963, Judson University offers a Christian, liberal arts and sciences education through its Bachelor of Arts degrees for more than 60 majors, minors, graduate, and online programs, as well as certification and accelerated adult degrees. For more information, visit www.JudsonU.edu.

The World Leaders Forum funds entrepreneurship, diversity programs, and RISE scholarships for developmentally challenged students at Judson.

Following Monday night’s event, P.G. Nkalang'ango, a Judson senior from Tanzania and majoring in computer science, said he was most impressed with Olmos’s emphasis on simple disciplines, such as making one’s bed in the morning, as integral to success.

“I realized that I need more discipline in both the small things and the big things in my life,” said Nkalang'ango.

Abigail Belsan, a junior from southwest suburban Lemont who majors in architecture, enjoyed Olmos’s “lighthearted discussion.”

Asked whether she was okay with the actor’s vision of God as female, Belsan replied, "Everyone has their own beliefs."

All shook up after seeing brilliant, new, 'Elvis' musical biopic

 

By Tom Siebert

“Nothing affected me until I heard Elvis,” John Lennon once said. And Bob Dylan described hearing Presley’s voice for the first time as “like busting out of jail.”

 

I grew up in a subsequent era, however, when the “King of Rock ’n’ Roll” was widely viewed as an aging Vegas crooner who had long left the building of musical significance.

 

But as I watched director Baz Luhrmann’s epic Elvis, I was caught in a trap for 159 mesmerizing minutes, making me astonishingly aware that Presley’s life was much more triumph than tragedy.

 

In a tour de force performance, newcomer Austin Butler completely inhabits the hip-swiveling, barrier-breaking international supernova of music, movies, television, and time present.

 

Seen in dizzying flashback through the dying eyes of Presley manager Colonel Tom Parker, played by a puffy, prostheticized Tom Hanks, Elvis is more of a fast-moving montage than a movie.

 

The sweeping, frenetic film slows down just enough to depict in riveting detail Presley’s poverty-stricken beginnings in Mississippi, early rockabilly recordings, audiences of screaming girls and seething boys, mediocre-but-money-making films, dutiful Army service, stunning television comeback shows, and final glide path to drugs, womanizing, gun-wielding paranoia, and world-mourning death.

 

The movie has been praised for its overall accuracy by Elvis’s ex-wife Priscilla and daughter Lisa Marie. But screenwriters Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, and Jeremy Doner did take some dramatic license.

 

While it is true, for instance, that Presley’s sexually suggestive stage mannerisms garnered the attention of law enforcement, there is no documented evidence that Colonel Parker made a deal with the U.S. government that sent Elvis into the service in exchange for no criminal charges being filed against him.

 

What’s more, or less, no one in Elvis’s living circle can recall him hanging out with B.B. King and receiving career advice from the blues guitar great, as was imagined in the movie.

 

Besides, it would have been much more fun to fabricate Presley cavorting with Chuck Berry, who may not have invented rock ’n’ roll but certainly wrote its early narrative of teenagers, jukeboxes, malt shops, and sock hops.

 

A reincarnated Little Richard does appear in the film, portrayed eerily accurate by Alton Mason, who sings “Tutti Frutti” with all wail and glory.

 

However, it is easy to believe that Elvis was indeed profoundly affected by the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

 

This would explain his dramatic shift from the good-rocking “Hound Dog” and “Heartbreak Hotel” to message songs such as “In the Ghetto” and “If I Can Dream,” the brilliant close to Presley’s NBC-TV special in December 1968 after the scrapping of a cheesy holiday medley.

 

But by far the most controversial aspect of the movie is the world’s top actor, Hanks, playing Parker as a gambling-addicted demon who exploited Elvis commercially, personally, and fatally.

 

“I made Elvis,” the colonel says near the end of the emotionally exhausting film. “But I didn’t kill him.”

 

No, he did not. And according to Parker’s biographer, Alanna Nash, there is no truth to the high-anxiety scene during which Presley fires his manipulative manager during a concert at the International Hotel in Las Vegas.

 

There is no question, however, that Parker’s 50 percent cut of Elvis’s earnings, coupled with the rigorous performing schedule that the manager demanded, played an integral part in Presley’s rise and fall.

 

But the singer’s electrifying voice––as well as his ingenious blending of blues, gospel, and country music––would have eventually changed the course of culture, even without the help of a conniving carnival barker.

 

When the 42-year-old entertainer died of heart failure at his Graceland mansion in Memphis on August 16, 1977, Elvis’s net worth was $5 million. His estate has since risen to an estimated $500 million, making him the most commercially successful solo act of all time. 

 

This movie, moreover, has already made more than $220 million, the second highest-grossing musical biopic behind 2020’s Bohemian Rhapsody, the story of Queen front man Freddie Mercury.

 

I went to see Elvis in suburban Chicago with members of my Christian singles group, a redemptive twist, considering that many churches, particularly in the South, once condemned Presley’s songs as “devil music.”

 

To paraphrase Dylan, the times they have a-changed. And Elvis is perhaps the biggest reason.

 

Kendall County PADS closes for good, transfers funds to health department

 

From left are Richard Velders, PADS board member; Melissa Creamer, community action director at the Kendall County Health Dept.; Tom Siebert, PADS journalist; Karen and Steve Allred, PADS site coordinators; Kathy Farren, PADS treasurer; Sandy Lindblom, PADS board chair; Anne Engelhardt, PADS exe-ators; Kathy Farren, PADS treasurer; Sandy Lindblom, PADS board chair; Anne Engelhardt, PADS executive director; Sara Poniatowski, PADS site coordinator; and RaeAnn VanGundy, county health director.

By Tom Siebert
Assistant director for community relations
Public Action to Deliver Shelter (PADS) of Kendall County

After several years of providing meals, shelter, and social services to the area’s unhoused community, Kendall County PADS has decided to dissolve the nonprofit homeless support organization.

Citing concerns over the COVID-19 pandemic that forced the shutdown of its PADS sites in March 2020, as well as the absence of a permanent facility to provide temporary shelter in the county, the board of directors recently voted unanimously to transfer $100,000 to the Kendall County Health Department.

“Thank you very much,” said RaeAnn VanGundy, executive director of the department,  following the vote. “We’re honored to serve this population. It is a blessing.”

Since 2010, PADS had been providing food and overnight housing at its seven shelters, each of which were open one night of the week between mid-October and mid-April.

But when the coronavirus crisis struck 26 months ago, the limitations of the PADS sites, located at six churches and a Christian school, became more apparent.

Public health guidelines such as social distancing could not be followed in sometimes tight housing quarters. And volunteers, many of whom are seniors, were concerned about health risks.

So the PADS board voted to close the shelters in March 2020, and again to keep them shuttered, in August 2021. Transportation was provided to escort homeless clients to the Daybreak Center in Joliet.

Moreover, law enforcement personnel has continued to transport those needing shelter to Hesed House in Aurora, county undersheriff Bobby Richardson told the board.

But most of the gap in homeless services has been filled by the Kendall County Health Department, which received federal relief funding to house clients in area motels and assign them to social workers from the Community Action agency of Kendall and Grundy counties.

Eleven people remained in the motels as of last March while others received housing vouchers to move into permanent places, VanGundy said.

“COVID had a silver lining because we were able to get them all in one place,” she asserted. “They felt normal, they felt dignified, and they were future-focused.”

Previously, those seeking shelter in the sprawling county had to either drive their own vehicles, or use private transit, to travel to and from each of PADS’ seven sites, often spending their in-between time at fast-food restaurants, the Oswego and Yorkville public libraries, and designated warming centers such as the Montgomery Village Hall.

Every year the homeless support group needed to recruit more than 500 volunteers, most of whom served once or twice per month, to staff the seven overnight shelters, working four-hour shifts.

“The volunteers were in the right time and place to serve people living in homelessness,” said Anne Engelhardt, executive director of Kendall County PADS.

For the past two years, a handful of those volunteers has been preparing and serving meals once per month at Daybreak. One of them, PADS treasurer Kathy Farren, said there are plans to continue to serve a monthly meal at the Joliet shelter.

She also stated that PADS’ outstanding bills will be paid out of $7,700 that was held back from the transfer of funds, and any amount remaining, plus any future donations, will be forwarded to the health department.

The PADS board voted to close out its treasury by July 31, 2022, and the nonprofit organization to be dissolved under federal tax law.    

Anyone wishing to donate or learn more about the health department’s homeless assistance services can visit their website at kendallhealth.org.

Kendall County PADS was founded in the fall of 2010 when seven houses of worship opened its doors to the homeless.

 

They are United Methodist Church of Plano; Harvest New Beginnings in Oswego; Church of the Good Shepherd in Oswego; St. Luke’s Lutheran Church in unincorporated Boulder Hill; Trinity United Methodist Church in Yorkville; Cross Lutheran Church in Yorkville; and Yorkville Congregational United Church of Christ.

 

In October 2017, Parkview Christian Academy in Yorkville replaced United Methodist Church of Plano as one of the sites.

 

During PADS’ ten shelter seasons, there were a total of 528 guests, 12,397 overnight stays, and 37,498 meals served, Engelhardt stated.

 

Barb Johnson is a founding member of PADS who served as assistant director for guest services,  in addition to site coordinator at Cross Lutheran Church in Yorkville.

 

“It was a good run,” she told her fellow board members. “We made people aware of the problem of homelessness in Kendall County.”

‘Belfast’ is a five-shamrock film of love over hate

 

By Tom Siebert

 

Hatred is indiscriminate, as evidenced in the harrowing hot open to the brilliant film “Belfast,” when a group of rock-throwing Protestants attack the homes of Catholics in a squalid section of Northern Ireland on August 15, 1969. But Protestants also live in the neighborhood and they are terrorized, too.

 

In this amazing movie, the maddening murkiness of religious and class warfare is seen through the wide, wondrous eyes of a nine-year-old lad named Buddy, portrayed with eternal optimism by Northern Irish actor Jude Hill, 11, who could become the youngest recipient of the Oscar for Best Actor.

 

Buddy views the adults in his Protestant family––Ma, Pa, Granny, and Pop––like the larger-than-life Hollywood heroes whom he watches awestruck at the local movie house, such as Gary Cooper in “High Noon” (1952) and Jimmy Stewart in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962).

 

And the boy’s grown-up loved ones are indeed heroic, protecting and pacifying him and his brother Will (Lewis McAskie) through the bloody beginnings of the Northern Irish sectarian struggle, now known historically as “The Troubles.”

 

Although religious and political differences had simmered in Northern Ireland for generations, a warlike conflict raged between 1968 and 1998, resulting in 3,352 deaths and approximately 107,000 injuries.

 

The bombings of the pro-Catholic Irish Republican Army (IRA), and the bullets from the pro-Protestant British paramilitary police, did not cease until the Good Friday peace agreement was brokered by the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton, dividing power between the Belfast-based nationalists and London-led unionists.

 

The film “Belfast” was written semi-autobiographically and directed masterfully by Kenneth Branagh, who grew up in the capital city and just happened to be the same age as his protagonist is in 1969.

 

Little clover Buddy sees and hears everything through a glass darkly: broken windows, slightly opened doors, and the whispers of his parents arguing whether it is best to move from their strife-torn neighborhood to safer London, where his father has been working as a joiner to support the family and pay off tax debts.

 

Jamie Dornan plays the accentuate-the-positive Pa, in the farthest cry away from his sadomasochistic sex trilogy “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

 

And Irish actress/fashion model Caitríona Balfe is the ferociously protective mother hen Ma, who rushes Buddy back to a riot-trashed grocery store to return a box of detergent that he had stolen.

 

Granny and Pop are portrayed, respectively, by the legendary Dame Judi Dench and Northern Irish actor Ciarán Hinds. Both deserve Academy Awards for their poignant, word-perfect performances.

 

Oh, and there’s Aunt Violet (Josie Walker), who cracks wisely: "The Irish were born for leaving. Otherwise, the rest of the world would have no pubs."

 

“Belfast” is starkly shot in vintage black and white, save for a brief explosion of technicolor from the 1968 musical fantasy film, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” which Buddy and his family go to see and cheerfully sing along with the title tune.

 

And writing of music, “Belfast” features gorgeous montages set to classic songs by Belfast-born Van Morrison such as “Warm Love,” “Days Like These,” and “Jackie Wilson Said (I’m In Heaven When You Smile).”

 

Buddy is in heaven himself whenever he sees his pretty, pig-tailed classmate, Catherine (Olive Tennant), who happens to belong to the “wrong” religion, Roman Catholicism, proving once again that love is blithely blind.

 

“Belfast” is a universal coming of age––and coming together as family––film that will resonate with everyone from often occupied Afghanistan to the divided states of America.

 

But the movie’s political violence is cause for caution. At its peak power, the IRA had only about 400 members, but they were enough to keep a war going for 30 years.

 

And on Jan. 6, 2021, a mob of “only” about 2,500 people attacked the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, DC, perhaps signaling the start of our own troubles.