MI5 officer Mac (Clive Owen) offers a tough deal to IRA operative Collette (Andrea Riseborough) in SHADOW DANCER
SHADOW DANCER (James Marsh, 2012)
Landmark Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves.
Opens Friday, May 31
212-330-8182
www.magpictures.com
www.landmarktheatres.com
Set during the waning days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, James Marsh’s Shadow Dancer is a taut, tense, if sometimes plodding thriller about loyalty and family. In 1973, young Collette McVeigh (Maria Laird) sends her baby brother, Sean (Ben Smyth), to do an errand she was asked to take care of, and she is filled with guilt when the boy is caught in the crossfire of an IRA shootout and killed. Twenty years later, Collette (Andrea Riseborough) is an IRA operative in the midst of placing a bomb in a train station. But after abandoning the plan, she is taken into custody, with MI5 agent Mac (Clive Owen) offering her a nearly impossible choice: spy on her IRA compatriots, including her two brothers, Gerry (Aidan Gillen) and Connor (Domhnall Gleeson), and get a new life with her son, Mark (Cathal Maguire), or face twenty-five years in prison. As IRA leader Kevin Mulville (David Wilmot) keeps a close watch on Collette, suspicious of her every action, her mother (Bríd Brennan) tries to keep the family together. Adapted by Tom Bradby from his novel, Shadow Dancer is highlighted by a strong central performance by Riseborough (W.E., Oblivion), who plays the trapped Collette with a mysterious intensity as she rarely does the obvious thing. Owen never really lets go as Mac, keeping the character too single-minded and direct, while a blond Gillian Anderson doesn’t have all that much to do as his boss, Kate Fletcher. But the film overcomes these minor flaws, as Marsh combines his history as both a fiction filmmaker (Red Riding Trilogy, The King) and a documentarian (Man on Wire, Project Nim) to tell a gripping tale that may be set in the dangerous world of 1990s Northern Ireland but is really, at its heart, about the seemingly unbreakable bond between mother and child.