An empathetic assessment of the problems
The thirty-year conflict known as the Troubles is often cited as a useful and potentially hopeful analogy for the deep-seated hostilities in Israel-Palestine. That makes the FX limited series “Say Nothing,” a scripted adaptation of journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction account published in 2018, uncomfortably well-timed. Set more than a year after the last war in the Middle East with no end in sight, ‘Say Nothing’ is a tragic, empathetic and balanced study in a similar self-perpetuating cycle of violence in recent history – and the trade-offs required are to bring it to an end.
The nine-episode “Say Nothing,” created by Joshua Zetumer (“Patriots Day”), is largely faithful to Keefe’s reporting, which used the disappearance and murder of single mother Jean McConville (Judith Roddy) to highlight the human cost of the Troubles in the north of the country. Ireland, a territory once fiercely disputed between members of the Irish Republican Army and English authorities associated with the area’s Protestant majority. (Catholics were a persecuted minority in Northern Ireland subject to widespread discrimination, while Protestants felt threatened by the prospect of unification, which could put them in the same position.) But because McConville is absent from the story and her ten children were still young At the time, the active drivers of the story and the actual protagonists of ‘Say Nothing’ are the IRA fighters themselves, especially the real-life figures Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle) and Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew).
Hughes and Price were both participants in the Belfast Project, an oral history that traded honest accounts of the IRA’s guerrilla war for the promise that the tapes would remain sealed until after the interviewee’s death. This exercise in collective memory provides a useful framework for Zetumer and his writers, as older versions of Dolours (Maxine Peake) and Brendan (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) recount their younger selves’ exploits with hindsight and a hint of regret. “It was all lies,” Price says bitterly about the Republicanism she grew up in, though it won’t be clear what she means by that until her story has fully played out.
As an adaptation, the boldest choices in “Say Nothing” are reserved for the final episode, when the freer rein of fiction allows the show to imagine McConville’s final moments, including the identities of her killers, in more detail than Keefe ever could. But the general truth about what happened to Jean is already clear enough: the IRA, made paranoid by the English use of informants, probably murdered an innocent woman on the unfounded suspicion that they were killing her neighbors in Belfast’s Divis Flats. spied, a notorious Republican stronghold. What ‘Say Nothing’ offers is a compelling account of what can drive people to such extremist acts, and the toll these actions take on both perpetrators and victims. It’s a project that many would dread in the abstract, but ‘Say Nothing’ and its uniformly strong cast give specificity to the IRA’s cause without excusing its atrocities.
After a teenage Dolours becomes radicalized after a mob beats her during a peaceful protest, she and her sister Marian (Hazel Doupe) take up the armed struggle, just as their father, aunt and other family members did before them. The Prices quickly become media sensations by participating in flashy operations, such as robbing a bank while disguised as nuns, a raid that yields very little money but a lot of attention. “Say Nothing” has the audience just as caught up in the excitement and adventure as the Price is, as the initial high sees them through the dark times ahead.
Dolours and Brendan’s closest compatriot is none other than Gerry Adams (Josh Finan), the future head of Sinn Féin and face of the Good Friday Agreement, who to this day denies any connection with the IRA, a claim that appears every episode is repeated in a disclaimer preceding the closing. credits. Along with Adams, Hughes and the Price conspire to plant car bombs, execute enemy fighters in broad daylight, and enforce brutal internal discipline, often requiring Dolours to transport doomed prisoners south. On the other hand, British officer Frank Kitson (“The Diplomat” star Rory Kinnear, once again cast as a villain) employs the same ruthless counterinsurgency tactics he once employed against colonial subjects in Kenya. ‘Say Nothing’ recognizes the validity of the IRA’s grievances and illustrates a commitment that is both admirable and dangerous when trained on the wrong target.
The sixth and most gripping hour of “Say Nothing” depicts the Prices’ months-long hunger strike while imprisoned in England, where the two led a plot to detonate four separate bombs in central London. The hour is also a turning point; de Prices would win their campaign for a transfer to their native island, but would remain behind bars for eight years. After their release, “Say Nothing” shifts from the heat of battle to the long-term trauma of the survivors – and from long-term battles to a negotiated solution, a transition symbolized by Adams’ turn into politics.
This back third of “Say Nothing” contains the most moving, complex material, and to the extent that the series frustrates it is that these elements are given less space than they deserve. (Although in a TV landscape plagued by bloat, wanting more is less a criticism than a testament to quality.) Dolours settles down with “Crying Game” actor Stephen Rea (Damien Molony), but we see little of their marriage beyond their initial courtship. and nothing of their divorce, an untapped opportunity to explore the impact of Dolours’ increasing substance abuse. As the peace process gets underway, the adult McConville children wage a public campaign to find their mother’s remains, but we learn little about the circumstances of their lives since the family was torn apart. Adams’ change of heart takes place off-screen, though that choice is entirely in line with a character who must be inscrutable and glosses over large parts of his past in the name of forging a better future.
As the McConville case literally digs up the past and sends bulldozers to a public beach in search of Jean’s remains, Dolours begins to wonder if her struggle, incarceration, and ultimately war crimes, have been in vain. (The IRA always viewed the Troubles as a war against foreign occupation, the British as a domestic uprising.) The soul-searching is necessary, but also a less interesting question than that of Adams’ trajectory. The title ‘Say Nothing’ refers to the rigor omerta fatally enforced by militants. But it also points to the silence demanded of the militants themselves in the name of progress and leaving sectarian violence behind. Peace and justice, “Say Nothing” convincingly argues, do not always go hand in hand; perpetrators must be integrated into society once they lay down their weapons, leaving victims without true closure. Sometimes silence comes at a price. Sometimes yes is the price, though “Say Nothing” never definitively rules out whether it is worth paying, a rare and precious antidote to absolutism.
All nine episodes of “Say Nothing” are now available to stream on Hulu.
