At one point in Kenneth Branagh’s sweet, glancing film memoir Belfast (now a 2022 Oscar winner), we see the young protagonist, Buddy (Jude Hill), reading a Thor comic book. Aha! A little joke—a reference to the fact that a version of this boy will one day go on to direct a movie version of Thor. It is one of the film’s few direct acknowledgements that this story is about Branagh himself, though the entire movie hinges on us knowing who this otherwise average kid in 1969 Northern Ireland will turn out to be.

That is, I suppose, the demand of projects like this, which gesture toward larger social history but really are just an artist remembering, offering up musings on their childhood to give us a fuller picture of themselves. This can, in the wrong hands (and even in some of the right ones), come off as preening vanity, the way that self-obsessed people think every little detail of themselves is fascinating. But in Belfast, Branagh avoids such aggrandizement, partly because he did, actually, grow up in interesting times.

The city of Branagh’s youth was gripped by The Troubles, a conflict between unionist (and largely Protestant) Northern Irish folk determined to stay in the United Kingdom and the republicans (mostly Catholic) who wanted to break off and join Ireland. In Branagh’s, and now Buddy’s, neighborhood, Protestants like Buddy’s family had long lived in harmony with their Catholic neighbors. Much of that falls to ruin in the late 1960s, causing many families to leave their homes and relocate to, hopefully, more peaceful climes.

Branagh’s was such a family, and that slow choice is gently delineated in Belfast. The film is told mostly through the eyes of 9-year-old Buddy, though we do spend time with his parents, who must have been the most beautiful people on the entirety of the Emerald Isle. Why else would they now be played by Caitriona Balfe and Jamie Dornan, who smolder away at each other (and at us), never all that mistakable for plain folk? Despite the absurdity of their Aero bar-melting hotness, though, both give modest, affable performances. Balfe is especially effective in scenes when the parents debate, with great pain, whether or not to leave their beloved community behind in search of safety and better opportunity.

The film is shot in a lush black and white, which immediately likens Belfast to another look back at a filmmaker’s childhood time and place: Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. But Branagh’s film is not so ambitious as Cuarón’s epic; he keeps things on an intimate, homey scale, preferring tart Irish humor and wistful boyhood pleasures over expansive flash and grandeur. This can make the film feel a little slight, even with the conflict bearing down on the family’s street—threatening Buddy’s clan with ostracization and, later, actual physical harm. 

What works best about Belfast is what Branagh doesn’t do. Though a few Van Morrison songs lilting over the soundtrack do risk cliché, there is otherwise an admirable lack of the expected schmaltz. Belfast is a trim 97 minutes long, leaving Branagh little room to indulge in the kind of What a Time It Was mid-century nostalgia that has so plagued film and television memoir for decades now. There are maudlin bits here and there, particularly when adorable little Buddy is having adorable little chats with his grandfather, played by Ciarán Hinds, and his grandmother, given signature pepper by Judi Dench. But those moments are spare and fleeting. And anyway, who wouldn’t want to hear a little witticism from Hinds or Dench, perched there in the corner of the frame like old birds?

One such exchange between Buddy and his gran involves the two of them on a city bus home from seeing a show. “You do love your films,” Granny says to Buddy (pronounced, of course, “fill-ums”). And, yes, we know that Branagh does love his films. This moment, connecting past anonymous kid to present A-list filmmaker, is far more winning than is that little Thor easter egg. Mostly because it’s another character, presumably based on a very real person, who is making note of a distinct, shining quality in the young Branagh. And it’s such a simple observation, one that only we in the audience know actually indicates big things. In that moment, Belfast’s scope briefly widens and deepens, becoming a portrait of the artist at his nascency: enthusiastic and in love, with only a dawning hope for all the wonder that was to come.

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