Watching “Say Nothing” is like watching a gangster movie, from the sweeping rise to the depressing fall. In “The Cause,” Dolours takes a pledge of loyalty to the IRA that mostly sounds like a military oath, barring the vow to remain silent right out of the Omertà. Episode 2, “Land of Password, Wink, and Nod,” opens with the Price sisters robbing a bank disguised as nuns. (The teller, a Catholic, helps them and speaks in Irish so her boss doesn’t realize.) Episode 6, “Do No Harm,” is a prison-set episode following Dolours and Marian’s eight-year imprisonment after they’re arrested and convicted for bombing London.
It’s in episode 3, “I’ll Be Seeing You,” where the bloody reality sets in. Dolours gets the new assignment of driving informants over the southern border to their deaths. The long scenes of car rides carrying dead men walking bring to mind the quote from “Donnie Brasco” about how the Italian-American Mafia handled problems: “When they send for you, you go in alive, you come out dead, and it’s your best friend that does it.”
Episode 4, “Tout,” shows how Republicanism became a religion for Northern Irish Catholics, when a woman turns her own husband in for being a British informant (a failed effort to buy him clemency, granted). Adams maintains a hardline no-forgiveness rule for the informants, saying it’s for the good of the cause, whereas Hughes is more torn-up about killing his own men, arguing, “The men are the cause.” By the end of “Tout,” you realize the IRA are killing their own people, the ones they’re supposedly fighting to liberate, more than they are the British occupiers.
That’s how “Say Nothing” dashes idealistic Irish-American notions of the IRA: by putting names to the soldiers and the victims. Violence in dire circumstances can be justified as an inevitable response, but leaving a family of 10 child orphans? The same children who the IRA was supposedly fighting on behalf so they might live in a free country? I can’t condone it.
Now, “Say Nothing” did not flip my perspective. Some of the IRA’s actions are indefensible but that still pales in comparison to the 800 years of British subjugation of Ireland. In episode 5, “Evil Little Maniacs,” when the Prices bomb London, I silently nodded when Marian threw Bloody Sunday back in the face of the British policeman interrogating her. (This refers to the 1972 massacre where British soldiers killed 26 peacefully protesting civilians in Northern Ireland.) The institutionalized discrimination against Catholics in the North of Ireland was an injustice that couldn’t stand either.
What “Say Nothing” has given me is new wariness about submitting yourself over to a cause so completely that any act carried out in its name can be justified.
“Say Nothing” is streaming on Hulu.
Related News :