Movie review: Jimmy’s Hall proves haunting

By Katherine Monk

Baked in the potato brown palette of the Depression, Jimmy’s Hall feels humble from the moment it opens with archival footage of New York City at its financial nadir, a collection point for lost souls and Dust Bowl survivors soothing their pains in the Jelly Roll jazz age.

The herky-jerky black and white imagery is seductive and serves to set up the time and place for this latest Ken Loach outing, but in some ways, it also sets up a quiet sense of disappointment as it suggests we’re about to see a sweeping period piece – instead of a pinhole take on a footnote in Irish history.

Based on the true story of James Gralton, and a subsequent play penned by Donal O’Kelly, Jimmy’s Hall takes us to the tiny village of Effrinagh back in the early 1930s as Gralton returns to his hometown after a stint in the United States.

Tall and handsome, Jimmy (Barry Ward) has a lot of charisma – but we can also tell he’s something of a divisive figure – though it’s not immediately apparent why.

The people in the village seem slightly wary of Jimmy. Some steer clear, and even those who know him well seem to recognize there’s inherent danger just being in his company. It brings a slightly soapy quality to the initial frames, which are so crisply defined, the movie starts to feel a little like TV – as though the viewer channel-surfed into some educational Euro-signal designed to prompt a deep sleep.

Combined with a thick Irish dialect and a stray narrative starting point, Jimmy’s Hall doesn’t exactly make the best first impression. But if you can hang in for the journey, it does offer some rather deep rewards.

The first is a better understanding of Irish history, because this isn’t a story of the Protestants vs. the Catholics, of North vs. South, of Queen vs. Country. Jimmy Gralton was a communist, and his biggest enemy was the Church of Ireland.

His chief offense was opening a community hall. Built by the people, and for the people of his county, Jimmy’s hall became a place where kids could learn how to box, where villagers could sing traditional songs in their ancestral tongue, and where townsfolk could dance the night away without fear of moral judgment.

Everyone still went to church on Sunday and confessed their sins to the parish priest, but the idea of any competition for the people’s hearts and minds proved too threatening to the conventional order, and Jimmy and his hall were slated for destruction.

As a play, the narrative would have unfolded within the limited space of the set, where characters played out pivotal moments in the story, offering historical context through dialogue and building various emotional relationships to keep it human.

As a film, shot in the actual historical location, Loach’s creation had the ability to sidestep some of the longhand, and create mood through visuals.

Contrasting the rich, green pastoral landscapes with the marble white walls inside the church, the warm timber hues of Jimmy’s hall becomes an optical middle ground – a place built to human scale for human interests, which is exactly mirrors Jimmy’s rhetoric.

The talking bits are, perhaps, the least interesting part of this movie – either because the accents are hard to understand, or the writing is just a little too laden – but they do give you a better sense of the era, whether it’s a family separated by poverty, the unspoken fear of authority, or the simmering sense of transition gripping the landscape.

Nothing really happens in this movie, outside of a guy opening a hall and a few of its repercussions, yet we can see the world changing through its lens as we watch a handful of ordinary people questioning common assumptions.

It’s nothing, and everything, at the same time – which is what Loach really does best. The king of the “kitchen sink” drama, Loach may not make action-packed sugar candy or anything remotely resembling American genre, but he does know how to render people in their natural surroundings.

It’s nothing, and everything, at the same time – which is what Loach really does best. The king of the “kitchen sink” drama, Loach may not make action-packed sugar candy or anything remotely resembling American genre, but he does know how to render people in their natural surroundings.

And that’s huge, even if it’s all small stuff, because how else are we to really understand ourselves as we are, when all Hollywood seems to show us is what we naturally aren’t?

Jimmy’s Hall brings it all back to something recognizable, even if the time and the place are so palpably different, because he finds the grinding point of ego – in both Jimmy and the priest – that cause the glowing frictions that light up history.

Loach lets us see the process that lit a fuse, and in turn, forces us to conjure the inevitable bang.
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@katherinemonk

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