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Black ’47 has been described as a western about the Great Famine. It tells the story (sometimes in Irish!) of a lone gunslinger on a dead-eyed revenge rampage and the law-man sent to bring him down. The law is corrupt, the land desolate and wild, the men are taciturn, brutal, brooding. The one woman with any dialogue meets a tragic end, so there’s no innovation there. The innovation comes in setting it in Ireland, where the indigenous population being brutally subjected by the settlers are Irish, not, for example, Native American or Australian Aboriginal, and in shifting your sympathies away from the oppressors.
Feeney (James Frecheville), our lone gunslinger, is a Connacht Ranger returned home to find the English have devastated his homeland and murdered his family. The film follows him working through an Arya Stark-style hit-list of everyone who wronged Ireland during the Famine. He is less a fleshed-out character than an avenging angel. Opposing Feeney, at least nominally, is Hugo Weaving doing his best lower-class English accent as Hannah, the troubled law-man who has been drafted in to track down and stop him.
Weaving and Frecheville are the binary stars of the story: the most interesting scenes happen when they’re on screen together. Various well-known Irish actors come and go in small roles: blink and you’ll miss Brendan Gleeson, and Stephen Rea as as a translator who joins the English when they hit the Gaeltacht, and Barry Keoghan’s there, too. This left me to wonder about the Antipodean leads. They’re good, Weaving especially, but were there no Irish actors to tell this very Irish story? It is a story Irish enough that I wonder how well it translates abroad, where the context is less apparent.
While Black ’47 fails to innovate on the western genre aside from moving locations, it feels like a timely piece for a modern Irish audience. It is full of lingering shots of ‘tumbled’, roofless cottages as the backdrop for starving, homeless people. The endless parade of blame-dodging by those in authority, who were “just following orders” that made them complicit in the tragedy around them, feels pointed. Where the film lingers in the maudlin, knowing anything about the Famine helps temper any knee-jerk impulse to snigger; being aware of the parallels between the man-made horror of the Famine and the man-made nature of the many crises facing modern Ireland will give you chills.
This review previously featured in our print edition, available now across campus and in select locations across Dublin.
