HIDDEN AGENDA (1990)

Indefatigable U.K. indie director Ken Loach takes on the Irish ‘Troubles’ (or rather Thatcher-Era Northern Irish ‘Troubles’) in both expected and unexpected ways.*  The ‘expected’ sees Frances McDormand and partner Brad Dourif as half of an international investigative team, currently in Belfast looking into police tactics that amount to Human Rights violations being justified as excessive violence to stop excessive violence.  It leads to the film’s McGuffin, a meaningful one in this case, an incriminating audio tape that causes Dourif to take a ride to a secret daybreak rendevous that goes deadly wrong.  So when the official report on the incident from British Special Forces and Northern Irish police proves self-serving coverup, Brian Cox’s honest, hard-nosed British detective is empowered to find out what really happened to the man and to the audio tape.  He functions like a police internal investigator, and is just as popular on all sides.  All this is fine, exceptionally well acted (particularly Cox’s world-weary, wised up, unstoppable force) and unfortunately all too believable, It’s also nothing new.  But that’s where Loach brings in the ‘unexpected,’ pulling out tropes from ‘70s paranoid political thrillers that go one step beyond usual Orange/Green allegiances and peer into messier/more consequential High Tory campaigns to influence U.K. politics.  True or not, it’s certainly convincing; and the portrait of power brokers running the government (the over-entitled titled) curving the arc of history to their liking is more deeply disturbing then the usual suspense.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Loach’s film on the ‘expected’ Irish Troubles was his big award-winner, THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY/’06.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/06/wind-that-shook-barley-2006.html    

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Loach & scripter Jim Allen’s main dramatic cheat is having too many political speeches outline differing goals & self-justifications (from the police, from the rebels, from the Tories) that would be as obvious to all the participants as they are to us.