Bloody good, and made me bloody angry, despite the bloody awful cinematography

Rating: Null/10 (6 June 2003)

You apprehend an armed man, who admits to being a professional bank robber, outside a bank. Inside the bank three people lie badly wounded on the floor. The bank robber blames the victims for their injuries, and (perhaps as an afterthought) also blames others standing in the queue; he says they started the violence. The victims blame the bank robber. Only if you were so feeble-minded as to have no ability to process evidence at all would you subject the two claims to an equal amount of scepticism. Anyone interested in arriving at the truth would be biased against the bank robber. Yes, it's not impossible that he's telling the truth; it's possible that the victims ARE to blame for their own injuries. But the burden of proof rests with him, with the man who walked into the bank carrying a rifle.
The following is public knowledge, known to people who weren't there and not denied even by the British army: The organisers of the march urged the people taking part not to resort to violence, however much provoked. They certainly didn't arm the marchers themselves. The officers of the army DID arm its soldiers, with powerful rifles, tear gas cannisters, heavy artillery and tanks. Moreover they did NOT forswear violence, even in the statements they made for the benefit of the press: on the contrary, they announced their willingness to use their weapons in retaliation; not just in self-defence, mind you, but in retaliation. That journalists could sit through a press conference in which Major-General Ford says, as a message to the organisers of the march: "Any violence that may result rests squarely on your shoulders," without snorting derisively, is surprising however much mainstream coverage you've seen of the recent attack on Iraq.
Greengrass has made a fictional recreation of an actual event and obviously he's had to fill in details. (Obviously, no outsider could possibly know for sure what Cooper said to his girlfriend in the privacy of his own home the morning before the march, etc.) But he's been exraordinarily careful, so far as I can tell, to fill in details in the most plausible way he can; only two or three times does anyone so much as utter a single line of dialogue that strikes me as unlikely (a line that sounds as though it may have been inserted for the purpose of exposition), and even then, not much. Not often, but sometimes, Greengrass has to choose between two conflictng accounts of what happened. If he doesn't do so he doesn't have a film. So he chooses whichever is most likely, which of course makes him biased; that is to say, a rational creature, and not a kind of walking dictaphone incapable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood.
Obviously I wouldn't be going to so much trouble to defend the film on this one point if I didn't also think it was good. It's a powerful and convincing account of a day gone wrong... a single day, with a couple of days' background, which is why people who accuse it of being a one-sided account of the conflict in Northern Ireland are also wrong: you either know or you don't why the protestors are marching, and the film doesn't include any forced exposition to try to cue in people who don't know. And while the film hints at what's likely to happen next, as a result of the violence, it doesn't include or pretend to include that story, either. I like a film that knows what it's about and what it's not about.
The cinematography is, alas, awful. What is Greengrass trying to do with all this needless, eye-watering camera-shaking - forge documentary footage? Only if he's a bigger fool than he could possibly be given the script he's written. He shows private domestic scenes no cameraman would be allowed to film, then wobbles the camera as though to remind us that there is a cameraman present, and an inept one, too, when in the world of the fiction, there isn't; and even outside the world of the fiction, one hopes that the cameraman isn't really as inept as he's pretending to be, although there's no direct visual evidence to the contrary. There's no excuse for such riding-over-a-cattle-grid photography. Nor is there an excuse for such horrible, dour, bluish-grey colour processing, the kind that announces to the audience, "I wanted to shoot in black and white, but they wouldn't let me."
Don't suppose for a minute that any of this HELPS the film. But the script, and Greengrasss sureity of purpose, are enough to ensure that it does little or no harm. We're taken completely inside the story despite (certainly not because of) the photography, and given the nature of what we watch... well, anger directed at the guy behind the camera seems misplaced.