A film sure to stir up controversy is the impending
Fifty Dead Men Walking, which comes out April 10. Based on the autobiography of
Martin McGartland, it's the harrowing tale of an undercover agent infiltrating the IRA. McGartland, a Catholic youth from the Republican stronghold of Ballymurphy, West Belfast, should have been a natural recruit for the Provos. As a petty crook, however, running one step ahead of a punishment kneecapping, he came to see the IRA as being as injurious to their own kind as they were to the hated "Brits" — in short, a bunch of thugs.
Easily tapped up by the RUC as a casual informer, the opportunistic McGartland began with the odd nod to nefarious activity in return for a bit of spare cash. Later, he had an epiphany. After the horror of the senseless 1987 Enniskillin bombing, he rejected any notion of the Armed Struggle and began working for Special Branch as all-out informer, enlisting in the IRA and passing intelligence from the inside. If ever revealed as a "tout", a traitor in such circles, he faced a fate worse than death. To the security services, though, as "Agent Carol", he was a godsend. His tip-offs, from 1987-91, are thought to have saved as many lives as his book's title implies.
Inevitably McGartland was rumbled. Tortured and set for a miserable end, he evaded his captors by leaping, bound, from a third floor window. Good samaritans and an ambulance spirited him to safety, from whence he went to the mainland, living a life undercover that endures to this day. In 1999, after his identity was inadvertently revealed, a hit squad — allegedly IRA — tracked him to Whitley Bay, Tyneside. They shot him six times at point blank range but, miraculously, he survived, unlike some of the other informers who had been unmasked. McGartland went to ground again, hopeful that one day he might be able to return to Belfast and see the wife and kids he had to leave behind.
The film, a great ticking clock thriller, made by the Canadian director
Kari Skogland, features a remarkable turn by
Jim Sturgess, the otherwise soft-spoken Surrey actor. Here, it's life on a knife edge, his only link to the outside world through his Special Branch handler (
Sir Ben Kingsley... who always, incidentally, insists on use of his title).
Until recently it would have been regarded as yet another film about The Troubles, reflecting on that era, pre-Peace Process, as a historical curiosity. Of course, the recent Continuity IRA killings have given it a whole new context, not helped by the fact that a quote: "The IRA were some of the nicest people that I ever met," was extracted from an Empire magazine interview Sturgess gave and run as a headline in
The Belfast Telegraph (the film closes the Belfast Film Festival on April 4). Sturgess had lived amongst former Provisionals while researching his role. Previously, the American actress
Rose McGowan, who appears in the film as a senior Provo, expressed some ill-advised and typically "Hollywood"
pro-IRA sentiments, which had the film's producers backpedalling furiously.
The big problem for the film may yet be McGartland himself. I can't go into details until my Sunday Times piece is in print, but he's not happy with his portrayal and the film in general, particularly as it used former IRA terrorists as advisers on-set also. He still feels sold short by the security services, it would seem. This story will run and run. The Daily Mail are going to jump all over it.
Let's just say that when dealing with this subject, even though it's just an Arts piece, one has had to tread extremely carefully. God knows what it's like being a proper political reporter! To my mind it's a rare, even-handed film with regard to McGartland's community — sympathetic to the Republican cause, highlighting the oppression of the Catholics, but ultimately revealing the IRA for what they are/were.
But check out those one-dimensional Loyalist forces. With the police based in an empty derelict warehouse, complete with dripping water and banks of surveillance screens, it's only just removed from Blade Runner. And why, in any drama about the Troubles, are the cops always English?
