Kenneth Branagh goes home for 'Belfast,' movie about his turbulent childhood

CHICAGO — Kenneth Branagh pours himself a cup of Big Ben tea, and while the downtown Chicago Peninsula Hotel has many plush and refined components, this particular teapot practically dares its user not to spill most of the tea onto the saucer, then the table, then the carpet, no matter how carefully the pourer pours it.

A different actor or, in the 60-year-old Branagh’s case, a different actor-writer-director and likely Academy Award recipient, might make improvisational hay on the unscheduled tiny disaster film in progress. But Branagh is too busy remembering the previous night’s Chicago International Film Festival screening of the film he wrote and directed: “Belfast.” The awards season favorite opens in theaters Friday, and it’s based on his early years in a working-class Protestant Northern Irish family in the time of the Troubles.

“The Music Box — what a beautiful place that was,” Branagh says of the prior night’s festival screening, held at the Lakeview neighborhood landmark on Southport Avenue. “Oh, my god. I couldn’t believe it. I was backstage and heard music and I thought ‘Are they piping music in?’ and I looked through the curtain and there’s the organist! (Dennis Scott was the organist.) “Unbelievable. Fantastic. Really magical. Like going back in time.”

Those who love it say roughly the same thing about “Belfast.” Set in 1969 to 1970, Branagh’s bid to join the bittersweet look-back genre spanning Fellini’s “Amarcord,” John Boorman’s “Hope and Glory” and Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma” tells of 9-year-old Buddy (Jude Hill), a free-roaming denizen of the predominantly Catholic streets.

The Protestant/Catholic violence has escalated and a life-changing escape plan for the family emerges in the form of a job in Reading, England, far, far away. Buddy’s father (Jamie Dornan) has been traveling there for work, back and forth from the Belfast neighborhood Buddy cannot imagine leaving. Nor can his mother (Caitriona Balfe), or grandmother (Judi Dench). Buddy’s ailing grandfather (Ciaran Hinds) sees his son’s dilemma a different way, weighing the costs of either fraught choice: staying put in the midst of violence, or taking off.

In his own life, Branagh told me, he didn’t see much beyond his own fear and sadness regarding a move to England at a tender age.

“My parents figured they were keeping us all safer, and they saw the economic opportunity. But removing my mother from a large extended family — 11 siblings; my father had seven — I mean, this was in addition to coming from a place where everybody knew everybody. It’s not as if my parents had any middle class aspirations; my father was playing the horses and a pub man through to the end.” (He died in 2006; Branagh’s mother died two years earlier.) “Their lives were simple. She would go to the bingo hall, and she loved dancing. Their habits, their values, were locked into that Irish thing about never getting any sorts of ideas about being ‘above your station’ — that was a cardinal sin.”

Branagh made “Belfast,” he said, “as an attempt to understand what happened at that time, and an attempt to bring some compassion to something I’ve tended to remember in a somewhat …” Here, a two-second pause, his first in our conversation. Then he finds the word:

“A somewhat wounded way. Now I realize that everyone was just attempting to do their best.” In a 1999 Sunday Times of London interview, Branagh’s brother Bill remembered young Ken as an emotional clone of their father. “He and my father hide their feelings,” he said. With “Belfast,” Branagh has tried to air out those feelings, as part of a broadly appealing slice of his life.

He began writing the script in March 2020, after everything locked down and the worst-managed pandemic in modern existence was just getting started.

“There was suddenly plenty of time and a lot of silence in the world,” Branagh recalled. “So I suppose it was easier to hear Belfast creeping in. I decided I’d be very disciplined, for me, anyway, and start writing by nine o’clock.” He made copious index cards crammed with separate incidents from his childhood years.

At one stage, he said, the movie was “full of songs” — “people singing ‘Pennies From Heaven’-style all the way through. We fully committed to a Dennis Potter-style of breaking into song and it worked well, actually. The first cut of the movie had all of that in.”

But, he said, “it was just too much.” In the editing phase, “the framework of the Troubles and specifics of the boy’s imagination” needed the focus. “So ultimately those song devices fell away.”

So did Branagh’s own performance, which is nowhere to be seen now in “Belfast.”

“At one stage, ‘Cinema Paradiso’ style, I had an older Buddy in it, looking back. I played that role, coming back to Belfast. But somehow it seemed to reduce things. It became more about trying to understand what my parents went through, their sacrifice.”

Branagh’s childhood imagination seized on the movies, and “Belfast” features loving remembrances of family outings to the Raquel Welch dinosaur picture “One Million Years B.C.” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” There were so many contenders for inclusion, Branagh said: “I mean, ‘Yellow Submarine,’ that trippy, trippy Beatles film, was in there for a while. ‘The Great Escape’ was in there for a while. A lot of it was unconscious, I suppose — escape movies. ‘The Sound of Music,’ with the escape over the Alps, we considered that, too. Those big, widescreen color pictures made a huge impression on me.”

“Belfast” ends just before the family’s new life begins. The years in England are left to the imagination. We don’t see what steps led to Branagh’s decision to become an actor; his early stardom; and his later years, which took him all over the world, including Chicago.

He came here first on a promotional tour of his film directorial debut, “Henry V,” in which he also starred. Then, in 1990, at the age of 29, with his then-wife Emma Thompson and the rest of his Renaissance Theatre Company, Branagh presented “King Lear” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as part of the late, lamented International Theatre Festival.

“We loved being here. We did a lot of mixing with companies from all over the world. We stayed at the Blackstone Hotel, right next to the theater, and we threw ourselves into the culture scene. We were a big museum and gallery-going group. They made me an honorary citizen, for reasons best known to the city. It’s still up on my wall, that plaque. Given to me by Mayor Daley. We were overwhelmed with kindness.”

Judging from his latest trip to Chicago, Branagh said, “all I have is a superficial, skirt-around-the-place impression. But it’s enough to feel the difference of this place from the rest of America. I have this sense that Chicago is more securely aware of itself than many cities. More at ease. People here are smart and savvy but less on manic high alert. People seem quite happy, even now, with the nervousness about COVID.”

Branagh wonders if fans of “Belfast” on the festival circuit — at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, it won the coveted Audience Award, considered an Oscar-friendly omen — respond emotionally to his treatment of his early years not in spite of the present moment, but because of it.

“At other festivals, I’ve heard from people who tell me how much it activates their own personal experience, whether it’s a story of loss, or a family moving from one place to another. A Nigerian man at one festival and an Iranian filmmaker at another both said: ‘That’s my story.’ There’s nothing sentimental about the Troubles. And there’s nothing perfect about my family. But there’s something in this story that seems to serve as a vessel for other people’s experiences.”

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“Belfast” premieres in theaters Friday.

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