The Journey review: a graceless Wikipedian plod through the Irish peace process
Dir: Nick Hamm; Starring: Timothy Spall, Colm Meaney, Freddie Highmore, John Hurt, Toby Stephens, Ian Beattie. 12A cert, 94 mins.
The death of Martin McGuinness in March was a sharp reminder that 11 years on from the St Andrews Agreement, the historical reputation of the former IRA chief turned Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland remains anything but settled.
Murderous gangster, staunch champion of unity, or some impossible reconciliation of the two? You might hope that The Journey, an apocryphal drama about one long day late in the Northern Irish peace process, would argue some kind of case – or at least interrogate the entrenched images of both McGuinness, played here by Colm Meaney, and his then-arch-rival Ian Paisley (Timothy Spall), the totemic Protestant leader and head of the Democratic Unionist Party. Instead, it plonks these two bulldozer personalities in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven car and has them squabble like an old married couple.
Directed by Nick Hamm (The Hole, Killing Bono) from a script by Colin Bateman, The Journey’s discreet title may be intended to suggest some shared DNA with the Stephen Frears political two-hander The Deal, with Michael Sheen and David Morrissey as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – or perhaps the bitterly hilarious professional rivalry of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip and its two Europe-set sequels.
Either way, the film imagines the two men left the 2006 St Andrews peace talks on day one: Paisley has to fly back to Northern Ireland to celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary, and McGuinness insists on travelling with him. (In reality, Paisley’s anniversary fell on the third and final day of the talks.)
Unbeknown to either, MI5 honcho Harry Patterson (John Hurt) and confidante of Tony Blair (Toby Stephens) has rigged their car with a hidden camera and microphones, and a driver (Freddie Highmore) who’s working undercover for the British establishment. His mission is to somehow turn their drive to the airport into a kind of political speed-date, during which these two bullishly stubborn men might find some common ground.
Spall, silver-haired and pacing around with that familiar polar bear stoop, gets Paisley’s physical mannerisms just right, adding a dash of caricature that places the character somewhere between Daniel Plainview, Daniel Day-Lewis’s stentorian oil prospector in There Will Be Blood, and Rikki Fulton’s Rev I M Jolly. (Filmed head-on from a low angle – in what you might call the pulpit shot – the likeness is uncanny.)
Of course, McGuinness never had a public profile to match his one-time enemy’s, which gives Meaney less scope for impersonation. But the actor’s performance is considered and tonally nimble, playing the Sinn Féin man’s convictions off against his regrets in a way that might have come off as genuinely soul-searching with a better script.
Conditions being what they are, though, almost every last breath of The Journey is extraordinarily badly written, from the various contrivances that bring the two men together without supervision, to the verbal sabre-clashing that ensues.
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Hurt and Highmore’s intelligence officers act as if in the throes of a nervous breakdown: at one point, they call off Paisley and McGuinness’s police escort for reasons that are never plausibly explained, purely so the plot can have the pair marooned in a forest minutes later. Later, they visit what must be Europe’s only pay-before-you-pump petrol station, which sets up some punishingly unfunny business with Paisley haranguing the sullen jobsworth behind the till.
Worse still, neither character says anything other than exactly what they’re thinking, and their thoughts are facile, unrevealing and gracelessly expressed. The recent Storyville documentary Bobby Sands: 66 Days teased out the gripping political and philosophical nuances from the smoky grey space between the Unionist and Separatist causes, but The Journey merely trundles round the talking points, tackling everything from Bloody Sunday to the hunger strikes at the same Wikipedian plod.
Around halfway through, Hurt gets a brief monologue that actually tries to rattle these events into their proper historical context. The sudden bulge of insight is like a sore thumb.
