Michael Collins (1996)

Neil Jordan's Michael Collins arrives from 1996 with the bearing of a monument: fog, gunpowder, and Liam Neeson in an enormous overcoat. It concerns the birth of the Irish Free State, the Treaty, and the civil war that followed, which means its interests are national, military, and tragic. The film has no patience for the modern vocabulary of identity. Its grievance is with London, not with power in the abstract. A story about anti-colonial struggle would today be filtered through a racial lens. This one is not. It is a story about the Irish, told by the Irish, for an international audience that required footnotes.

The cast is a wall of pale Irish and British faces, Julia Roberts included, assembled the way historical epics were assembled in that decade: by availability and gravity. No color-conscious accounting was performed, and none was expected. Kitty Kiernan drifts through the proceedings as a romantic obligation, a woman to be loved and then mourned, granted no interiority beyond that function. There are no queer currents here, no environmental anxieties, no sermons about bodies or brains. The film's deviations from the record are real and documented. Boland dies the wrong death, Broy meets a fate invented for him, and de Valera is rendered as a preening martyr to his own vanity. Those liberties serve a nationalist melodrama, not a progressive rereading of the past.

What the film does carry is an old-fashioned moral, delivered with a straight face and a full orchestra: brothers who split over a treaty will bury each other. That lesson lands with some weight. It is the weight of a history teacher, not an activist. The camera lingers on Collins's death in the Cork rain, and the film asks us to feel the waste of it. It does not ask us to examine our complicity in anything. There is something restful in that, and something faintly antique. The picture belongs to an era when a serious film about a revolution could simply be about the revolution.

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