In The Name Of The Father Direct
Miscarried Justice and the Forging of Identity: A Critical Analysis of In the Name of the Father
A more complex layer of the film is its treatment of violence. While the Guildford Four are innocent of the pub bombings, Gerry is not innocent of petty crime, and the film includes a flashback to a Belfast riot where British soldiers shoot a young woman. Sheridan thus acknowledges the real grievances underpinning the Troubles. However, he draws a sharp line: armed struggle by paramilitaries is distinct from the non-violent, working-class morality of Giuseppe Conlon. When Gerry is finally released, a crowd of supporters chants his name, but Sheridan resists triumphalism. The final shot is not the courthouse steps but Giuseppe’s empty chair in the visitors’ gallery. The film’s pacifist stance is not naive—it recognizes state violence as the primary engine of injustice—but it also insists that innocence is not a simple binary. The tragedy is that a flawed but harmless young man is punished as if he were a bomber, while the real bombers remain free, a bitter irony the film neither celebrates nor fully resolves. In The Name Of The Father
The film’s core engine is the evolving relationship between Gerry (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Giuseppe (Pete Postlethwaite). Initially, Gerry is a petty thief and aimless drifter, dismissive of his father’s quiet integrity and devout Catholicism. Giuseppe, a linen worker from Belfast, embodies a non-violent, community-oriented Irish identity—one rooted in decency rather than sectarian rage. Their physical and ideological separation in the cramped prison cell becomes a crucible. Miscarried Justice and the Forging of Identity: A
Sheridan frames the British judicial and police apparatus as an institutionally prejudiced machine. The police (particularly Inspector Dixon, based on a real officer) are shown falsifying notes, withholding exculpatory evidence, and threatening witnesses. The film’s visual language reinforces this: police stations are shot with cold, fluorescent lighting and claustrophobic framing, while the Conlon family home in Belfast is lit warmly, even when under military observation. This contrast codifies the state’s logic: anyone Irish, especially from Northern Ireland, is a potential terrorist. The label “IRA” functions as a presumption of guilt. Crucially, however, Sheridan avoids demonizing all English characters. Gareth Peirce (Emma Thompson), the Conlons’ solicitor, is depicted as tenacious and ethical—proof that institutional corruption is not national but procedural. This nuance strengthens the critique: the problem is not “England” but a specific mode of authoritarian policing enabled by political panic. However, he draws a sharp line: armed struggle
Day-Lewis’s performance—losing weight, refusing heat between takes—amplifies the film’s physicality of suffering. Postlethwaite’s Giuseppe, frail yet immovable, provides a moral anchor. Sheridan and cinematographer Peter Biziou employ a restrained palette of grays, browns, and institutional greens, with prison sequences framed through bars or half-shadows, suggesting perpetual surveillance. Only in the final courtroom scene does natural light flood in, yet even then, the light is harsh, not warm. Justice, the film implies, is not healing; it is merely the cessation of active persecution. The sound design, too, reinforces alienation: the cacophony of Belfast streets contrasts with the eerie silence of the prison wing, broken only by the rhythmic knock of a father checking on his son.
