"Five Minutes of Heaven" (2009)

Rage, Forgiveness and Points in Between

Two Irishmen talk and talk and talk, often in separate physical spaces that reflect their very different head spaces. In “Five Minutes of Heaven,” a feature-length talkathon built on a sketchy premise, some unpersuasive psychology, a pinch of politics and strong star turns from Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt, the appeal of all those words runs out long before the director Oliver Hirschbiegel turns off the spigot.

Mr. Neeson plays Alistair Little, a Protestant who in 1975, at 17, murdered a 19-year-old Belfast dock worker and Roman Catholic, Jim Griffin. Jim (Gerard Jordan) was watching television in his family’s living room when Alistair, wanting to make a name for himself in the Troubles, fired a gun through a window, shattering glass, skull and the happiness of everyone involved, including Jim’s 11-year-old brother, Joe. Years later the adult Alistair and Joe (Mr. Nesbitt) are being chauffeured in separate cars to a reunion orchestrated for television during which they are meant to express their long-simmering feelings. This bid at truth and reconciliation doesn’t go as planned, even as the story finally follows a familiar narrative arc.

Initially Mr. Hirschbiegel, a German director best known for “Downfall,” makes you forget the gimmicky setup by just letting his two fine leads do their thing, interweaving their conversations with their drivers with intermittent flashbacks to the scene of the 1975 crime. Mr. Nesbitt, his head bobbing and weaving, plays a man whose anguish appears to be shaking him up from the inside out, knocking and rattling around his guts, rib cage, head. When the movie cuts from Mr. Nesbitt sweating and fidgeting (and talking) in his car to a flashback of his mother yelling at him when he was a child (she irrationally blames him for his brother’s death), you can well imagine that her angry shouts still reverberate in his ear.

Mr. Neeson, by contrast, who can loom so large on screen, at first seems somewhat physically diminished in the constrained space of a car, his big body shrouded by the low lighting. He’s also still as stone, eerily becalmed. (Later you realize that part of Alistair is already dead.) He talks in low, soothing tones about Joe, expressing concern for the other man’s welfare almost as if he were a priest or a therapist. Mr. Hirschbiegel peels back Alistair’s declared empathy layer by layer, letting the character come into focus gradually. Everyone has their own good reasons, as Jean Renoir puts it in “The Rules of the Game.”Alistair and Joe have their reasons, but too many seem to have been contrived for this movie.

“Five Minutes of Heaven” is done in by its screenplay, which was written by Guy Hibbert, a playwright who based the story on his conversations with the two real men who gave their names and memories to this project. The real Mr. Griffin had refused to appear in a documentary with Mr. Little, vowing to kill him. Seeing the dramatic potential in this nonmeeting, Mr. Hibbert worked with them on the script, though the two didn’t meet. Writing a fictional version of their lives might have helped them. But the film itself suffers from the conceit that movies about trauma must be so tidied up that the audience doesn’t have to think unpleasant thoughts, including those that might have kept the real men apart.

FIVE MINUTES OF HEAVEN

Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel; written by Guy Hibbert; director of photography, Ruairi O’Brien; edited by Hans Funck; music by David Holmes and Leo Abrahams; production designer, Mark Lowry; produced by Eoin O’Callaghan and Stephen Wright; released by IFC Films. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Liam Neeson (Alistair), James Nesbitt (Joe), Anamaria Marinca (Vika), Richard Dormer (Michael), Mark Davison (Young Alistair), Kevin O’Neill (Young Joe) and Gerard Jordan (Jim)
.