Jim Sheridan makes forceful dramas about families under pressure, trusting actors to make the suffering matter. We rate that directness, especially with Daniel Day-Lewis, but his willingness to rearrange facts can weaken our confidence in the telling.
Fi1m perspective
A father and son talk in prison, and Jim Sheridan lets the conversation matter without advancing the story. In In the Name of the Father (1993), Daniel Day-Lewis and Pete Postlethwaite give him enough to hold our attention. We were moved by the father-and-son scenes because Sheridan makes time for the small hurts as well as the ordeal they share. He is a director we rate most highly when he stays close to his actors.
His first feature was My Left Foot (1989), followed by The Field (1990). The latter, adapted from John B. Keane’s play, put Richard Harris at the centre. Day-Lewis’s third film with Sheridan was The Boxer (1997). With In America (2003), a semi-autobiographical story of an Irish immigrant family in New York, Sheridan drew more directly on his own experience.
Gerry Hambling’s editing gives In the Name of the Father forward momentum without hurrying past those family exchanges. Trevor Jones’s score adds weight to the suffering, matching Sheridan’s taste for direct emotional appeals. The pace keeps the anger from becoming repetitive, while the music makes no attempt to soften it. We can hear how hard the film is trying, but for much of its length the actors justify the effort.
The screenplay, written by Sheridan and Terry George, is where that confidence needs checking. Its factual liberties make the family’s suffering more immediate, and they also make us less willing to accept the account as history. We want the facts treated as carefully as the performances.
Later work, including The Secret Scripture (2016), has drawn complaints of conventional, disjointed storytelling. That is a reason to be selective. Start with In the Name of the Father, and choose company willing to discuss it afterwards.
Biography
Jim Sheridan is an Irish film director, screenwriter and producer. Born in Dublin in 1949, he began his career in theatre, co-founding the Project Arts Centre and later serving as artistic director of the Irish Arts Center in New York before turning to film.
Sheridan made his feature debut with My Left Foot (1989), which he co-wrote and directed. He followed this with The Field (1990) and In the Name of the Father (1993), on which he also served as producer and co-wrote the screenplay with Terry George. Subsequent films include The Boxer (1997), In America (2003) and Brothers (2009). He has received six Academy Award nominations.
