Five Minutes of Heaven

Written by Ivan Kollmen Tuesday, 16 June 2009 17:11

Year: 2009
Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel
Cast: Liam Neeson, Anamaria Marinca, James Nesbitt, Niamh Cusack, Conor MacNeill, Barry McEvoy, Juliet Crawford, Lalor Roddy, Mark Davison, Richard Dormer, Andrea Irvine, Paul Kennedy, Gerard Jordan, Jonathan Harden, Diarmuid Noyes, Paul Garret, Richard Orr, Ma
Genres: Drama
Runtime: 90 min.

Last night's Five Minutes of Heaven was a Northern Ireland revenge tragedy. It was also drama's revenge on reality television. Its (rather audacious) insistence was that the dramatist has the better claim to the ownership of emotional truth than the documentary maker. The background to the director Oliver Hirschbiegel's film was therefore almost more interesting than the production itself for neither Alistair Little, as played by Liam Neeson, nor Joe Griffin, as played by James Nesbitt, were fictional characters. In 1975 Griffin's 19-year-old brother James really had been murdered by the 17-year-old Ulster Volunteer Force member Little. The writer Guy Hibbert spoke to each about how he would feel about meeting each other and then imagined the confrontation as set up by an earnest yet exploitative television documentary. The producers would have their notions of how such a meeting would go: apprehension beforehand, frostiness at point of contact, the suppression or, even better, the expression of anger, tears and, question-mark, forgiveness. Truth and reconciliation, co-opted as a TV format.

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