Film series ends with Jimmy's Hall

Leave it to director Ken Loach to depict a heartwarming yet very serious and sombre moment in Ireland’s history. Only a century ago, the people of the picturesque country were intensely divided over their faiths and allegiances during the Irish Civil War.

Jimmy Gralton (Barry Ward) fought his battle and lost, ending up trying to start anew in New York. When the stock market collapsed in 1929, he finds himself back home in County Leitrim, back with his ma on the family land, and soon back in trouble with the church and other local landowners.

You see, Jimmy was considered a communist because he and many of his friends had established a community hall where people could come and learn about art, talk about literature, or just simply have a good old fashioned Saturday dance. This is something that the Roman Catholic Church simply could not abide as it had the sole right to provide education, or so it claimed, primarily through Father Sheridan’s (Jim Norton) assertions.

When Jimmy returns to his home, it doesn’t take him long before many from the community start prodding him to reopen the hall, which he does. For a time, things are fine with painting classes, discussions about Yeats, and the occasional boxing lesson. Father Sheridan and others take the opposing side, however, and a new kind of civil unrest is borne. He and the church had many friends in government and police, multiplying the trouble that they are able to cause for Gralton and his band of friends.

Based on the play by Donal O'Kelly, Jimmy’s Hall is not one of those crowd-pleasing The Commitments type movies about great music and people dancing. It’s a film with a message about the oppressive nature of the church and the systematic suppression of a people under an authoritative state. This isn’t exactly soft matter so don’t expect to watch dancing in the streets from start to finish. It’s more akin to Dirty Dancing but with a more historical basis, something that better illustrates the painful divisions of ideology and religion, all while set in a pretty little countryside town.

This movie does also have a slow pace also but the runtime is still under two hours.

Loach is known for his intimate and social activist filmography with titles such as Riff-Raff, Hidden Agenda, and Palme d'Or-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley (also centred around the Irish Civil War). Like I said, don’t expect to be cheering from the audience and dancing in the aisles. What you should expect is a poignant and remarkable story behind the only instance of an Irishman being deported from Ireland and all because of a community hall.