Paisley sits in outraged silence for the first portion of the drive, while McGuinness tries to make conversation. Then a series of phony events—a detour through a forest, a run-in with a deer, a confrontation at a gas station—transforms the two men, and they finally start talking. McGuinness and Paisley argue over familiar territory: Bloody Sunday, the Enniskillen bombing, the hunger strike. Their views are so diametrically opposed that they basically live in alternate realities. They have fights, which include cliched lines like: "You are so defensive!" "Alright, walk away, walk away, that's what you do!" The moments where McGuinness gets the icily reserved Paisley to crack a smile are sitcom-phony, at best, and it's made even more egregious by Tony Blair and Gerry Adams gasping with excitement from afar that the Emotional Healing has begun.
In 2016, Spall played, back-to-back, two inflammatory and despised real-life men, Holocaust denier David Irving in "Denial" and now Paisley. Spall did so, in both cases, without pleading for any sympathy for the characters, suggesting the striations of fragility, narrowness, and rigidity in these men's emotional makeup. In "Denial," he is vigorous, staunchly upright. In "The Journey" he is believably decrepit and frail. His hatred of the man in the car with him—and all that that man represents—is so believable that it makes his rock-hard refusal to open up to McGuinness' joking comments understandable. His voice is a dead ringer for Paisley's booming religious-harangue tones. (After the doomed Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, Paisley addressed a crowd of protesters in Belfast, screaming, famously, "Margaret Thatcher tells us that that [the Irish] Republic should have some say in our province. We say NEVER! NEVER! NEVER! NEVER." Paisley's gigantic voice thunders "Never" over and over again in a kind of incantatory rhetoric, and Spall does not shy away from the intimidating size of Paisley's voice.) Meaney has a thankless role, the McGuinness of "The Journey" being the guy who has to persist in warming up Paisley, almost like a Life Coach, using his charm and humor.
The final exchange between Paisley and McGuinness, when they shake hands, is the best, but by then it's far too late. The plot-manipulations and artificial events stage-managed by Mission Control back in St. Andrews all serve to diminish the peace talks, the importance of tough compromise, and the reality of what is actually required of politicians when they decide to sit down at a table such as that one.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46tn55lmqTCs7rEsmRraGFs