“Jimmy’s Hall” is a history lesson wrapped in a love story, tied with a bow of lyrical, unapologetic idealism. Directed by Ken Loach and written by longtime collaborator Paul Laverty, this gentle, richly filmed, fact-based drama uncovers a little-known chapter in Irish history, when a man named Jimmy Gralton opened a dance hall in County Leitrim as an effort to enliven townsfolk and farmers who, in the depths of the Depression, had no place else to go.
But Gralton was a communist, and his aims for the hall — to serve not only as a place of entertainment and escape, but also as a center for learning, culture and political organizing — drew the scrutiny of the parish priest and other factions left over from the Irish civil war of 1922-23. “Jimmy’s Hall” often falls prey to the kind of starchy, expository writing and didacticism that places the good guys on the left and the bad guys on the reactionary right. But the pull of the story — along with Barry Ward’s subtle, slightly battered portrayal of the quietly pugnacious Gralton and the classical look and feel of the film — are well nigh irresistible.
Aesthetically and sequentially, “Jimmy’s Hall” is something of a follow-up to Loach’s magnificent 2006 historical drama, “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” which chronicled the civil war and the Irish War for Independence that preceded it. In 1932, when “Jimmy’s Hall” opens, Ireland is tentatively trying to heal those old wounds.
When Gralton returns from a 10-year exile in New York, he brings with him new jazz records and dance steps, which he soon shares with his delighted followers in the hall, where neighbors teach neighbors how to sing, speak Gaelic, draw and interpret Yeats. But nothing gold can stay. Jimmy and his hall are soon in the cross hairs of a censorious local priest (Jim Norton) who treats County Leitrim as his personal fiefdom and rails against the hall in his sermons, associating it with everything from Stalinist purges to paganism to the Anglo-Saxon hegemony of the British.
Although the story also tracks Jimmy’s courtship of Oonagh (Simone Kirby), an old flame who’s now married, things get a bit plotty and speechy from there on. But Loach’s idealism and affection for his protagonist are infectious. Seen through another lens, “Jimmy’s Hall” is actually quite timely, its brief and shining moment of flinty self-reliance resembling the modern-day DIY movement, decades before DIY became chic.
