'Jimmy's Hall' a visual feast based on real-life Irish story

Mini-review: ‘Jimmy's Hall'

The supreme joy of watching Ken Loach's real-life Irish version of “Footloose” is cinematographer Robbie Ryan's lush, naturally lighted 35-mm. images, any one of which could be framed on a living room wall and compete with 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer's photo-realistic paintings.

“Jimmy's Hall” is a talky, relatively restrained political drama that gives us the skinny on why Ireland deported James Gralton, one of its own citizens, in 1933 without a trial.

Jimmy, played by a charismatic Barry Ward, returns from America after 20 years to help his aging mom at his rural Irish home in 1932, a decade after the bitter war of independence between England and Ireland left open wounds.

We see through flashbacks how Jimmy once operated a community hall that offered rural citizens free classes in dancing, art, poetry, history, music, literature and sports, all enterprises that threatened the control of the Catholic church, headed by parish priest Father Sheridan (Jim Norton), who waged a cultural war against Jimmy and the hall.

With Jimmy back, bored young people beg him to reopen the hall and give them some desperately needed culture, especially music and dancing. He does, and history repeats itself with a much older but not wiser Father Sheridan out to crush the communistic center for the purity of the church.

“Jimmy's Hall” marks the 24th drama from the technically polished activist filmmaker, and it weighs in with a battery of his favorite topics, among them the value of collective bargaining, and the eternal conflict between oppressive institutions and individual liberties.

The movie also presents an unrequited romance between Jimmy and the girl he left behind, Oonagh (Simone Kirby), now another man's wife with children. No hanky-panky here. Jimmy and Oonagh share a dance together, just the two of them, silently expressing lament over the “what-ifs” of their lives.

If Jimmy comes across as just a tad bit too noble and flawless as a man of political action, that's OK.

Loach's sincerity bleeds through every frame, giving “Jimmy's Hall” just enough momentum to move forward, and then to be moving.

“Jimmy's Hall” opens at the Century Centre and the River East 21 in Chicago. Rated PG-13 for drug use, language, nudity, sexual situations, violence. 106 minutes. ★ ★ ★

• Dann Gire's Reel Life column appears Fridays in Time out!