Omagh

Paul Greengrass was one of the writers on this film made for Irish TV, in effect a melding of Sunday Bloody Sunday and United 93, and Pete Travis directs very much in the distinctive Greengrass style of docudrama -- in close, intense, in the middle of the action, handheld and quick-cut. Here the terrorism is homegrown -- a faction of the IRA tries to undermine the Good Friday Accords by setting off a car bomb on Market Street in Omagh, Northern Ireland, on August 15, 1998, killing 29 and wounding 200, many of them children. Of course many more are actually wounded by the senseless violence, including the family of one dead young man. His father is played by Gerard McSorley, who becomes the spokesman for a group of families seeking justice from the authorities, who in turn variously have their own reasons to make the problem go away, to cover their asses or “not to disrupt the peace process.” So no one is ever tried for the crime, and the family needs to find its own way of healing. Available on DVD from Netflix, this film is a moving and informative statement on one of the salient traumas of our time, the super-empowerment of small groups of angry men bent on destruction, and their continuing effect on the social fabric. (2004, Sund/T, n.) *7*