“IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER” (Directed by Jim Sheridan. Starring Daniel Day Lewis, Peter Postlethwaite, Emma Thompson)

DESPITE ITS title, In The Name Of The Father barely gives you time to bless yourself. Within the opening ten minutes alone, there’s a massive explosion, a ferocious chase sequence and a full-scale riot.

Like the fist-brained cops whose diligence kept Gerry Conlon’s story in development for over fifteen years, Jim Sheridan’s film kicks its way into your life, grabs you by the hair and bundles you into the back of a speeding van before you even know what the hell is going on.

This momentum is maintained throughout the movie, and is crucial to its success. By its very nature, this could so easily have been one of those chest-beating, bloodied but unbowed bio-pics whose righteous indignation leaps off the screen to applaud itself at every available opportunity. Sheridan could, quite justifiably, have chosen to shoot the whole thing in Appalling Vista-Vision as a straightforward exercise in spleen-venting and Brit-bashing. But he didn’t.

What he gives us is an assiduously-crafted, often understated tale of the complex and turbulent relationship between a father and his son set against the backdrop of monstrous injustice. To a large extent, it’s the film that Sheridan has been threatening to make for some years now.

At the core of both My Left Foot and The Field lay an attempt to grapple with the fraught and inarticulate struggle for mutual respect between fathers and sons, especially Irish fathers and sons. With In The Name Of The Father, he gets to explore this turf more thoroughly by dint of wretched reality bequeathing the convenient plot device of both father and son winding up in the same prison cell for crimes neither of them committed.

We first meet Gerry Conlon (Daniel Day-Lewis) as an unruly-haired lout-about-town in early ‘70s Belfast, who keeps himself in beer-money by stealing lead cladding from rooftops. His antics have his old man, Giuseppe (Pete Postlethwaite), a scrupulously law-abiding bookie’s clerk cursed with a bad heart, driven to distraction. Fearing for the preservation of his son’s kneecaps (the friendly,neighbourhood Provos having earmarked him as an undesirable) Giuseppe urges Gerry to move over to London where he can build a new life for himself. Their leave-taking scene is classic Sheridan: a tongue-tied fumble for the right words by two people whose usual mode of communication is through gritted teeth.

On the boat to England, Conlon hitches up with his old mucker, Paul Hill (John Lynch), and together they howl in delight and relief as they sail out of Belfast docks to a country where, they’ve been led to believe, the streets are paved with dope and free love.

All goes well for a while. In London, they track down another old mate from home, Paddy Armstrong (Mark Sheppard), and they move into the hippy squat of which he’s a rather permanently stoned member. They smoke, they make out, they slope off to Gerry’s Auntie Annie Maguire’s for sausages (eating dead animals is frowned upon by the commune), they generally act the goat and then, all of a sudden, they become the prime suspects in the hunt for the perpetrators of the most devastating bombing on British soil since the Second World War.

By now, everyone knows that the case against The Guildford Four (Carole Richardson, Armstrong’s girlfriend, completing the hapless quartet) was sealed with the paltriest forensic and circumstantial evidence imaginable. In The Name Of The Father, however, reminds us just how absurd it must have seemed, even at the time. During the trial, Gerry Conlon can’t stop himself from creasing with laughter when his Auntie Annie and her teenage family are described as a “support network of experienced bomb makers.”

When Giuseppe travels to London to sort out what he assumes is some sort of unfortunate misunderstanding, he too is deemed to be an important warlord in this terrorist conspiracy, and is suitably fitted up to give Her Majesty some pleasure for what’s left of his life.

In the central roles of the Conlons junior and senior, Daniel Day-Lewis and Pete Postlethwaite are astounding. Especially in the early stages, Day-Lewis pulls off something that is both an impersonation and a portrayal – he even manages to capture the real life Conlon’s habit of blinking furiously when he gets worked up. His performance in the harrowing and brutal interrogation scenes alone are probably the finest work of his impressive career.

Pete Postlethwaite, meanwhile, is a familiar old lag from a thousand British television dramas but his characterisation here of a dutifully-religious, quietly-determined Irish father with a firm belief in the intrinsic decency of the system, is utterly compelling.

“Telling the truth will stand to you,” he assures Gerry during the trial, and even when they end up in prison he battles hard to save himself and his son from despair. In fact, his optimism remains bravely intact right up to the night his heart finally packs in and he dies in his cell, a convicted terrorist.

With the relationship between Day-Lewis and Postlethwaite so prominently poised in the foreground, the other characters are bound to seem comparatively one-dimensional but the supporting cast still manage to make their presence felt. Emma Thompson’s Gareth Pierce, however, is little more than a narrative linking tool, and from what I’ve read about Ms. Pierce, she is certainly a sharper and more assured courtroom operator than Thompson’s rather melodramatic performance towards the end of this movie would suggest.

Elsewhere, Don Baker acquits himself quite well as McAndrew, the vicious Provo who for a while, in prison, becomes a sort of violent surrogate father to Gerry Conlon. And, if the film fails to grip you on any other level (which I doubt), you can always play a game of Name That Face – every dog, divil and music biz head in Dublin seems to have had a walk-on part in this production.

In The Name Of The Father is being released in the U.S. and here in Ireland first, presumably to pre-empt the predictable accusations of “IRA propaganda” from the British right-wing press when it eventually opens over there in February. As we saw with The Crying Game, there are plenty of Irelandophobic hacks around who are only too willing to grasp the wrong end of sticks that don’t even exist. But that this film will make some British viewers feel very uncomfortable is an undeniable fact, and proper order too.

It is impossible to watch In The Name Of The Father without a knot of anger forming in your stomach. It is a tough, tender, truthful and thoroughly unforgettable piece of work.

Treat yourself to a ‘Father Christmas.

• Liam Fay