Say Nothing: A True Crime Mystery Set Against the Nightmare of The Troubles
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A-
“Every film about war ends up being pro-war,” director Francis Truffaut once said in an interview, a perspective echoed by Francis Ford Coppola and critic David Thomson in his book about war movies, The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film. The vicarious thrill of adventure, the adrenaline rush of battle, and emotional bonds of camaraderie outweigh the moralizing or depictions of grief and suffering.
These tensions are certainly at play in the new nine-part FX series, Say Nothing, carried on Disney+ in Canada. The series, a substantial work of historical recreation, is set against the background of The Troubles, the vicious Northern Irish sectarian conflict from the late sixties to the nineties, that saw Catholic militants at war with Protestant loyalists, the British army and Ulster police.
The source material is the 2019 bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe, a lucid and dramatic page-turner, based on hundreds of interviews, including material from the Belfast Project (2000-2006), an oral history of the conflict conducted by Boston College.
The series follows the same pattern of mixing true crime thriller with historical reconstruction and it’s impeccably acted by a largely unfamiliar Irish and English cast. American show runner, Joshua Zetumer (Robocop, Patriot Game), working with a team of Irish and English directors, has produced a well-calibrated mix of immersive action with sufficient moments of reflection or, as a cringy Telegraph headline put it, it’s about the “tragedy — and the thrills — of The Troubles.”
The fireworks and action take place in the early episodes, interspliced with testimony by their sober middle-aged selves, 30 years later, confessing to the Belfast Project interviewer and implicating Gerry Adams as the man who gave the orders. A coda to each episode reminds us that Adams has consistently, if improbably, denied any involved with the Provisional IRA.
As with Keefe’s book, the series is framed around one unsolved murder, emblematic of the sustained cruelty that tore apart the country and took more than 3,500 lives over a 30-year period. In late winter of 1972, Jean McConville, a 38-year-old recently widowed mother of 10, was abducted at gunpoint from her West Belfast home in front of her children, and never seen alive again. The reenactment of the abduction of McConville (Judith Roddy) takes place in the first episode of the series.
While the thought of the murdered mother hangs over our thoughts, the early episodes of Say Nothing is almost perversely entertaining, a sort of variation on John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, a tale of zealotry, betrayal, and terrorism as theatre.
The central figure in the series is not McConville but Dolours Price, a strong-willed volunteer for the Irish Republican Army. Price is played at two stages of her life, by a superb Northern Irish actor Lola Petticrew as the young radical through her twenties, and by English actress Maxine Peake (Shameless) as the older Dolours, including scenes of her testimony to the Boston College project where she looks back on her own history with regrets and anger that her brave deeds were made meaningless by a compromised truce.
We see how Price and her loyal younger sister, Marian were raised in a hardcore IRA family. An aunt, Birdie, who shared their home, was blind and handless from a bomb-making error in youth. The teenaged girls argue with the old school IRA dad that it was a new world of non-violent protest, inspired by Ghandi and Martin Luther King, but after being savagely beaten by a Loyalist mob at a civil rights march, they change their minds.
Not only civil rights but the women’s liberation movement is in the air, and we see how Dolours and her sister claim their rights to be the equal of the male activists. Tired of lending moral support and rolling bandages, they take part in dangerous missions, including driving people across the border without asking questions.
Joining the paramilitaries, Dolours tells her interviewer, was “fun.” She and her sister dress up in wigs and costumes, put on habits as bank-robbing nuns and outfox the British military, who arrived to bring peace but end up inflaming the violence with their brutality.
Her testimony is corroborated and amplified by the testimony of another Provisional IRA lieutenant, Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle), a.k.a. “The Dark” later famous as one of the leading figures in the 1981 hunger strike, who describes a typical day in the Provisional IRA (a bit of dialogue only slightly altered from his testimony): “So, uh, so this is a regular Tuesday morning for me, right? I’d leave the call house [a safe house] around 8. Then I’d stop by the arms cache to pick up the guns we hid. After that, I might do a bank, put a bomb in the town. Maybe try to sneak in a pint.”
Price wanted to step up to another level, leading a team of young revolutionaries to London for the Old Bailey bombing of 1973, the beginning of the IRA’s bombing campaign in England. The mission, partly botched, partly successful, injured more than 200 people about whom we hear nothing.
There is, however, an episode devoted to the stretch when Dolours, then just 22, and her sister, 19, were held in a men’s prison in England, violently force-fed for more than 200 days when they attempted a hunger strike.
After being transferred back to Northern Ireland, they were released eight years later on medical grounds. Price, who is now dead — and who previously told her story in the 2018 documentary I, Dolours — lost most of her twenties behind bars but emerged a physically and mentally damaged celebrity.
She was married for 20 years to the actor Stephen Rea (The Crying Game) with him she had two children, before descending into alcohol and drug dependency. She felt cheated by Gerry Adams, who by making efforts toward a political peace, robbed her of moral justification for her actions.
For the world outside Northern Ireland, Adams was hailed as a peace broker but in the series, he comes across as an opportunistic sociopath. He is introduced as a skinny bespectacled youth (played by Josh Finans), who Dolours knew from high school who quickly rose to a leadership position within the Provisional IRA.
Seen intermittently through the series (played by Michael Colgan in his later years), Adams evolves from an earnest grad student full of political maxims to a cold-blooded terrorist and enforcer, to a politician who denies any connection to a violent past as he helps negotiate the peace process.
Later in the series, we see the efforts of Jean McConville’s orphaned but now adult children, stonewalled as they seek justice and explanation for the death of their mother, answered by a wall of denial and barely veiled threats. The book and series take their title from a poem by Nobel Prize–winning poet, Seamus Heaney, “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” about “the famed Northern reticence, the gag of place.”
Say Nothing, which I watched over six hours in a single sitting, is a genuinely troubling experience. That’s not because it makes violence entertaining, or that it sometimes treats conjecture as fact, or that, arguably it short-shrifts victims of violence.
Rather, it’s disturbing because of something it does well: depicting a dark tendency in humans that extends far beyond the small corner of the world that George Bernard Shaw once called “an autonomous political insane asylum.”
To quote Aldous Huxley: “To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behaviour, ‘righteous indignation,’ this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
Say Nothing. Created by Joshua Zetumer. Starring Lola Petticrew, Maxine Peake, Hazel Doupe, Anthony Boyle, Josh Finan and Michael Colgan . Available on Disney+ November 14.