In the Name of the Father Review

Twenty minutes of interrogation carry this film. Peter Biziou lights the Guildford cells in a sick green and keeps close while Gerry Conlon is taken apart by sleeplessness and a gun held to his head, and Day-Lewis plays the false confession as a frightened boy's capitulation rather than a martyrdom. The cell scenes with Pete Postlethwaite are the reason to watch.

His Giuseppe is quiet, pedantic, visibly ill and entirely unimpressed by his son, and the friction between them stays unsentimental far longer than expected. Then the film begins inventing. Father and son were never held in the same cell. Emma Thompson's Gareth Peirce is a composite who turns up to discover one suppressed file and win the case with a speech, and Thompson performs advocacy instead of a person.

The third act throws away the procedural patience of the first hour for a courtroom confrontation that never happened, finished off with Bono on the soundtrack and a raised fist on the steps outside. Sheridan directs the prison riot and the fire with real force, but a case this damning did not need the help, and the invention makes the true parts easier to wave away.