It's the full story of four men framed for being IRA terrorists. The film is entirely about the man's confession of the IRA bombing, a strange confession that he did not commit, which leads to his father's imprisonment as well.
In this powerful, Oscar-nominated movie, Jim Sheridan infuses a fact-based social injustice drama with a more intimate family tale of estranged father and son, splendidly played by Daniel Day-Lewis and Peter Postlethwaite.
In the Name of the Father is a deeply stirring film that lessens the moral authority of the I.R.A., English soldiers in Ireland, the British police and the British government.
In the Name of the Father is a model of this kind of engaged, enraged filmmaking, a politically charged Fugitive that uses one of the most celebrated cases of recent British history to steamroller an audience with the power of rousing, polemical cinema.
The complicated relationship between the rebellious Gerry and the quietly tormented Giuseppe is one focus of the film. The obvious political implications of the dreadful situation are another.
This is a stirring and exceptionally well acted, though controversial, dramatisation of Gerry Conlon's book about the grave miscarriage of justice suffered by the Guildford Four.
The picture turns into a kind of stylized morality play about the right and the wrong ways for Irishmen to respond to distorted portraits of their character, and it's terrifically effective.
Day-Lewis, so intricately repressed in The Age of Innocence, here offers a role reversal in an unreserved and emotional performance that throws caution and inhibition to the winds.
If Sheridan didn't feel the need to pile on the pedantic subtexts, this would be an absorbing personal drama, rather than a vituperative, question-begging broadside.
