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BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
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 Posted - 01/04/2013 : 16:36:56
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Good work by James Marsh who previously brought us Man on Wire and Nim, two documentaries that sought the drama in real life.
Shadow Dancer is fiction, though Tom Brady's screenplay from his own novel, is well informed by his time as the Ireland correspondent for Independent Television News.
Though Brady has always professed apolitical objectivity, his career leans to the right, and certainly in the mid-1990s [during the time the Anglo-Irish agreement was being negotiated], the establishment was his focus.
This is reflected in Shadow Dancer, set precisely during those years. Marsh has reduced the focus of The Troubles to the McVeighs, an active IRA family around Belfast, still figuring out how they can use passe resistance methods against a political inevitability.
A brief prologue tells us that the McVeighs' young son was murdered by occupying British troops some 20 years before. Brid Brennan as the matriach, the remaining two boys, and daughter Colette [wonderfully played by Andrea Riseborough], have pledged their lives to vengeance.
But when Colette is sent to London to carry out a planned attack, she's apprehended by MI5 before the local copshop can claim her. And she's offered a deal.
It's the cat and mouse games that follow which bait the film.
Most of it works on its own terms. Marsh tells his story with clarity - no easy task for an audience even today unfamiliar with the details of a conflict which has been played out under their noses for decades.
Colette's main contact is Clive Owen's Mac, an operative who, in turn, is being run by his superior [Gillian Anderson, crisp, brisk and professional], and plagued by his own personal problems.
I suspect in Brady's novel there's room for some meandering in the past. But in the film there are narrative gaps, and it's these which cause the story to stumble.
The scenes between Owen and Riseborough sizzle at every level. But between them there are dips and sags which means that the tension needs to rev up from scratch at each new encounter.
But it's certainly worth watching, and yes there's some quite surprising stuff to question your own possible simplistic equations.
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Shadow Dancer
