The Journey review: ludicrous retelling of McGuinness and Paisley paths to peace

There is a great film to be made about the negotiations that led to the St Andrews Agreement in 2006. The array of characters is as varied and compelling as that in The Godfather: Ian Paisley, Martin McGuinness, Tony Blair, Gerry Adams. The personal and political conflicts offer endless fodder for juicy drama. Just wheel it out.

Sadly, The Journey is not that film. Timothy Spall is sly and dourly humorous as Paisley. Colm Meaney is amusingly folksy as McGuinness. Though only obliquely imitative of their inspirations, those two performances come close to justifying the project's existence. Unfortunately, the clunkiness of the dialogue and the absurdity of a key fictional conceit nudge The Journey towards misguided folly. The Battle of Algiers it is not.

The film begins with promising suggestions of Peter Morgan's work on Blairsploitation pieces such as The Deal and The Queen. Negotiations have reached one of their many impasses as Paisley prepares to travel home for a significant wedding anniversary. Concerned about looming storms, the authorities elect to send the DUP leader to Edinburgh airport by car.

In a smart nod to the zero-sum logic that dominated the peace process, Colin Bateman’s script has McGuinness demanding that he too gets a ride in the limo. (If them lot get Irish then we want “Ulster Scots”.) Conversation begins slowly and grumpily.

This didn’t exactly happen. But the road trip is a perfectly decent structure to allow the teasing of personality and motivation. The film has decided that McGuinness was the persuader and Paisley was the reluctant bride. Conversation is, thus, taken up with the former IRA man trying to talk the sometime Dr No into finally saying “yes”. Oh well. We have seen more egregious simplifications in historical drama.

Meaney and Spall have great fun tussling towards the inevitable concession. The former trades in realism and exasperation; the latter flavours Old Testament fury with bitter jokes. Neither is any more like his source than Anthony Hopkins was like his in Nixon. But, like Hopkins, they create fleshed-out quasi-fictional characters that hold the attention. (I suspect only the Irish will note mild inconsistencies in both accents.)

The dialogue is at its best when at its most frivolous. The actors revel in an amusing riff about the Northern Irish habit of adding an unnecessary assurance clause to the end of every second sentence, so they do (as I have just done here). The attempts to talk the audience through the intricacies of the Troubles are much less successful. Paisley and McGuinness are constantly telling each other things they already know. Ian tells Martin about the Enniskillen bombing. Martin tells Ian about Bloody Sunday. To paraphrase Seamus Mallon on this very political process, the film feels, at times, like conflict negotiation for slow learners.

The Journey might, however, still have worked if the writer had resisted one ludicrous narrative innovation. It transpires that the limousine driver, played by Freddie Highmore, is an MI5 operative being fed leading questions through a hidden earpiece by John Hurt's intelligence chief. A camera mounted in the rear view mirror allows the negotiators in St Andrews to watch the conversation as Hurt manipulates it towards completion.

By the close, Blair, Bertie Ahern and an initially outraged Gerry Adams are shouting round the telly as if they’re watching the FA Cup Final. Nothing is added by this conceit bar an implausibility that renders much of the later action unintentionally hilarious. Is Bateman implying that the intelligence services masterminded the whole deal? If not, then the subplot is all the more inexplicable.

Still, if the Peace Process taught us anything it is that initial failure should deter no person from striving harder for worthwhile goals. After all, in 2002, we got two films on Bloody Sunday in the same week. The material is still here for a good film and somebody really needs to talk Ciarán Hinds into playing Paisley.