Shadow Dancer

Director: James Marsh
Screenplay: Tom Bradby (based on his novel)
Stars: Clive Owen (Mac), Andrea Riseborough (Collette McVeigh), Gillian Anderson (Kate Fletcher), Aidan Gillen (Gerry), Domhnall Gleeson (Connor), Brid Brennan (Ma), David Wilmot (Kevin Mulville), Stuart Graham (Ian Gilmour), Martin McCann (Brendan)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2012 (Europe) / 2013 (U.S.)
Country: U.K. / Ireland
Shadow Dancer
Shadow DancerShadow Dancer is a potent, ultimately disheartening slow-burn drama set against the backdrop of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Director James Marsh, who is best known for his documentaries Man on a Wire (2008) and Project Nim (2011), builds the story, which was penned by Tom Bradby based on his 2001 novel, slowly but surely, accumulating small details into a potentially devastating portrait of the conflict between blood ties and political allegiance. With its tactile sense of time and place and often-whispered dialogue, it is a film that will find appreciation amongst patient and attuned viewers. While some may understandably find the proceedings a bit too methodical in their pacing, it ultimately rewards with a powerful third act that actualizes much of the violence—both physical and emotional—that has been simmering just beneath the surface.

Andrea Riseborough plays Collette McVeigh, a young, single mother who was radicalized after she witnessed her younger brother die from being accidentally shot during an exchange of gunfire between the British police and the IRA in early 1970s Belfast. She feels particularly guilty for the death because he was out running an errand assigned to her, so her ideological radicalization carries a particularly strong personal charge, as if working for the IRA is the penance for her childhood sin. The majority of the film takes place in 1993, in the waning years of the “Irish Troubles,” where we are re-introduced to Collette as she moves silently through the London Underground, her clear agenda being to plant a bomb.

The plan doesn’t work out, and she ends up being nabbed by the British authorities. In custody, she is offered an opportunity to become a mole for the British by MI5 agent Mac (Clive Owen), who tells her in no uncertain terms that, if she doesn’t comply, she will never see her young son again. Thus, she begrudgingly becomes a turncoat, which once against associates the political with the personal: She betrays the radical politics stemming from her brother’s death in order to preserve her relationship with her only child.

Collette is a particularly prized asset because she comes from a staunch IRA family. Both of her brothers, cold and focused Connor (Domhnall Gleeson) and the more sensitive Gerry (Aidan Gillen), are high-ranking IRA officers. Collette lives with them in the childhood home they share with their mother (Brid Brennan), who watches their activities and clearly knows what is happening, but says very little. However, as Mac soon learns, her usefulness to MI5—whose calculating proficiency is embodied in Gillian Anderson’s icy bureaucrat—is purely utilitarian, and any promises made hold little value if it is more politically expedient to nullify them, which puts her and her son in grave danger. Although Mac is cold and hard when first interrogating Collette, he clearly grows to admire her determination and willingness to do anything to protect her son, which puts him in a compromised position vis-à-vis his superiors who care little of burning her if it meets their needs. Thus, Mac, who is played by Owen as a weary professional whose inability to stay emotionally disinterested in his brutal line of work is his potentially fatal weakness, becomes an interstitial figure, a man torn between multiple allegiances in a world that cannot allow such conflicts.

Although set within incendiary political terrain, Shadow Dancer is nimble in avoiding a stance in favor of one side or the other. If anything, the film suggests that the real tragedy of conflicts such as “The Troubles” is that no one wins. Everyone involved must become a literal and figurative murderer, and doubt, suspicion, and brutality reign supreme on both sides of the divide. Collette is a crucial figure in this regard, as her physical delicacy belies her extreme intensity, making her all too easy to underestimate. Riseborough, who American audiences recently saw playing opposite Tom Cruise in Oblivion, gives a stand-out performance, conveying a woman who has become so hardened by her experiences and loyalties that even her most genuine attempts at intimacy have a forced, desperate quality. She is a shell of a woman trying to be whole, but stymied at every turn. Her decisions at the end of the film are logical in their own way, but also disheartening, as is the film itself, suggesting as it does that bloodshed only breeds more bloodshed, and even the most noble attempts to rise above it may very well go up in a cloud of flame and smoke.

Copyright ©2013 James Kendrick

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Overall Rating: (3)




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