Five Minutes of Heaven

When I found out about Five Minutes Of Heaven I was rather excited partially because I enjoy most of Liam Neeson’s work but also because I am of the opinion that we have made more than enough Vietnam/Woodstock/anything-about-the rise-and-fall-of-the-American-Dream-and-its-struggles-of-the-1960s-1970s films whilst completely ignoring the madness which was occurring all over Europe during the same period. One such conflict would be that of Northern Ireland, in which thousands lost their lives due to riots, political killings and, in many cases, senseless murders over nothing more than religious and political intolerance of people who did little else to deserve death than be born. Five Minutes of Heaven is intended to tell one such story.

Jim Griffin was murdered in Lurgan, Northern Ireland on October 29, 1975, shot to death by Alistair Little in front of then eleven year old Joe Griffin, Jim’s little brother. The film is broken into two parts, the first of which was pain-stakingly recreated as much as humanly possible in order to depict the murder as it happened that night.

This first part of the film is brilliant, not only setting a tone and giving a real feel, or at least what seems like a real feel for someone who has never been to Northern Ireland, of the atmosphere that lurked over Lurgan in 1975. Perhaps even more importantly, the understanding of our teenage anti-heroes soon to be murderers is amazingly well fleshed out. The dialogue goes a long way in helping to explain what was going on in their minds, which is all the more powerful knowing that the dialogue was inspired by interviews with the real Alistair Little.

The second half of the film then jumps forward to present day and depicts a fictive scenario in which Jim Griffin and Alistair Little meet in an organized TV interview which is, sadly, where the film then grinds to a halt and begins to fall apart. The idea was good in principle, all of the dialogue again was spliced together using interviews that that been made with both Little and Griffin and the idea of what they would have to say to each other was an interesting one to ask. It turns out that what they have to say is nothing terribly surprising: Little is sorry for what he did, but does not deny having been proud for doing it, and Griffin is torn and full of rage with nothing but a desire for revenge and we all ultimately learn that revenge leads to nowhere and we would all be better if we could learn to let the past go. The theme, though getting old, is not necessarily a bad one, but in order for it to mean anything, an audience needs to know why they should care about the characters.

Most stories have three acts, in which the first sets up the scenario, the second brings the drama to a crest and the third resolves said drama either comically or tragically. The problem, ultimately, with Five Minutes of Heaven is that it only has the first and third act. Where is the second act? What happened between 1975 and 2009? Why did Little repent? How did Griffin, who is portrayed as a man driven by a solitary desire to seek revenge, start and maintain a family during all of this? What happened when Little went to prison?

So many moments of dialogue explained in the second half could have easily been fleshed out into entire sequences that would have given the characters a bit of depth. In such one moment, Little explains what had happened to the Griffin family as a consequence of the death of Jim Griffin, explaining that it is sad because it happens often to the families of murder victims. Why didn’t they show that? I don’t want to sound like a sadist but it is through seeing that kind of suffering that an audience has time to sympathize with a character. If we suffer with Griffin, we see him more as a tragic hero when he starts thinking about trying to kill little than assuming he’s gone completely insane- and believe me with some of the monologue scenes in this film you might well think he has.

Speaking of which, the monologues are something else I have to complain about. They go on forever and I understand that in theory they should allow us to understand the inner thinkings of the characters, here especially Griffin, but I felt like reminding the director that there are other tools at his disposal and if he were so inclined he might choose to use some when attempting to develop a character. Regardless, I don’t want to entirely rip the film to shreds on the issue of these scenes because they did at least show one emotional reaction that I haven’t seen in a movie: random cursing. Seriously, I am persuaded that we all do it but I don’t know anyone who admits to it: being so angry about something in your mind that you just burst out with an obscenity, making you look like a total psychopath to all those around you because they have no idea why you just snapped. Little moments do keep the film from being a total dud to just being not memorable.

In all fairness though, my criticism of Five Minutes of Heaven is only the latest in a long list of reviews that were not moved by the films approach to the troubles of Northern Ireland, save for the paper called Culture Northern Ireland who in fact gave it four out of five stars. I would imagine here that the problem here is that people in the know don’t need all of the extra drama and input that critics like myself feel robbed of in this film. If you lived anything similar to the conflict these men represent, you don’t need their motivations fleshed out because you already know them, perhaps even all too well. Like a lot of foreign films, Five Minutes of Heaven seems to speak more easily to those who understand the subject matter with some real experience in it and after all, the film was made by the BBC first and foremost for people living in Northern Ireland.

And on that note, it turns out that Five Minutes of Heaven was in fact a made-for-TV movie in Britain so how come I had to pay to go see it at the Ritz?