Susan Granger’s review of “Jimmy’s Hall” (Sony Pictures Classics)
While not as compelling as his highly acclaimed “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” (2006), this is the latest addition to Ken Loach’s socially conscious films about downtrodden people who challenge the dominant political narrative.
Set in 1932 in bucolic County Leitrim, still recovering from the Irish War of Independence 10 years earlier, the story revolves around Jimmy Gralton (Barry Ward), who returns home after being summarily deported to Depression-era America because he was deemed subversive by the Roman Catholic Church.
Jimmy’s ostensibly back in Ireland to help his ailing mother (Aileen Henry) with the family farm, but he soon gravitates to meetings held in the now-abandoned Pearse-Connolly Hall, which he founded a decade earlier.
Refurbished and revitalized into a community center, it becomes the place where young people come to study the poetry of W.B. Yeats and other Irish icons, along with enjoying popular music, dancing and boxing.
“The hall is a safe place,” Jimmy maintains. “It brings out the best in us.”
“What is this craze for pleasure?” questions Father Sheridan (Jim Norton), the parish priest, who condemns jazz music, along with the building, describing it as the “Los Angeles-ization” of the culture.
This social hub is also where Jimmy reunites with Oonagh (Simone Kirby), his former sweetheart who’s now married. While Jimmy gives her a pale blue dress he bought for her in New York, their sexual attraction becomes virtuously sublimated into collective organizing, which erupts into a protest against the forced eviction of poor tenants laborers from the estates of wealthy landowners.
Working with his longtime collaborator, screenwriter Paul Laverty, British director Ken Loach skims over the elusive socio-political context to concentrate on the fictionalized conflict between provocateur Gralton and the oppressive clergy of the “Holy Mother Church.”
Evocatively filmed on location in Leitrim and Sligo, it depicts in meticulously realistic, period detail the harshly picturesque countryside where the actual events occurred.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 o 10, “Jimmy’s Hall is a subtly stolid 6, a romanticized cinematic portrait of a Celtic agitator who died in New York in 1945 and is buried in the Bronx’s Woodlawn Cemetery.
