FACT-BASED `SON' CAPTURES WAR'S TRAGIC IRONY.

Byline: Stephen Holden The New York Times

Nothing in a recent film captures with more devastating force the perilous atmosphere of life during wartime than an early scene from ``Some Mother's Son.''

As the fresh-faced uniformed students at a Roman Catholic girls' school in Northern Ireland rehearse an elaborate step-dancing routine, a bomb explodes outside the classroom, smashing windows and inciting pandemonium where discipline and calm had prevailed an instant before.

Helen Mirren, in one of the juiciest roles of her career, plays Kathleen Quigley, a widowed, stubbornly apolitical teacher in the school who is unaware that her son Gerard (Aidan Gillen) is one of the Irish Republican Army members who set off the blast.

The scene in which this dashing, spirited young man borrows his mother's car under false pretenses and matter-of-factly wreaks destruction with his accomplices is one of the film's many disquieting moments.

Kathleen's willful innocence soon is shattered during a Christmas dinner when police officers burst into her home and arrest Gerard as one of the bombers. Suddenly a woman who assiduously shunned the political fray in Northern Ireland finds herself in the thick of it.

``Some Mother's Son,'' written and directed by Terry George, might loosely be described as the sequel to ``In the Name of the Father,'' the much-admired 1993 film for which he wrote the screenplay. For this film, Jim Sheridan, who directed ``In the Name of the Father,'' has ascended to the role of producer (one of three).

The new film, which like its predecessor is based on fact, doesn't have a quirky central character such as Gerry Conlon, the young Belfast layabout (played by Daniel Day-Lewis) who was wrongly convicted of being an IRA terrorist and locked up for years. But it is pointedly more partisan in its portrayal of British government officials as brutal, icy oppressors of a heroic, if tragically overzealous nationalist movement. And it uses film clips of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher damningly against her.

Focusing on a much more famous real event, a 1981 hunger strike by IRA members in Maze Prison in Belfast that left 10 dead, including the strikers' leader Bobby Sands, ``Some Mother's Son'' is a more conventional docudrama. It interweaves fact and fiction with the crisp immediacy of a beautifully shot and edited news film.

Mirren's character is an Everymother who, before the story ends, is forced to make an agonizing decision about whether to allow her son to die for his cause (which he is more than eager to do) or to interfere and exercise her legal right to save his life. By law, when a hunger striker lapses into a coma, a parent can sign a paper instructing that the striker be force-fed.

The film parallels Kathleen's journey from apolitical pacifist to placard-waving pro-IRA demonstrator, with that of Annie Higgins (Fionnula Flanagan), a belligerent IRA supporter whose son Frank (David O'Hara) is arrested with Gerard.

A stout, red-haired woman of blunt passions, Annie embodies the aggrieved, intransigent soul of Roman Catholic resistance to British rule. Flanagan's magnificent performance conveys a mixture of ominous militancy and maternal vulnerability that is as compelling as it is utterly believable.

By contrast, Mirren scrupulously underplays Kathleen. In a role that could have been milked for tears, Mirren brings out Kathleen's tense, questioning determination to save her son while following her own political conscience.

The character always seems to be anxiously hanging back from a display of feeling. She is too busy absorbing experience to waste time dissolved in grief. Because of their philosophical differences, the solid friendship that develops between the two mothers retains a lurking undercurrent of distrust.

A good part of the film is devoted to dramatizing events that began in 1976, when the British government changed its official policy toward jailed IRA members and decided to treat them as criminal terrorists rather than political prisoners.

The Irish nationalists refused to put on prison uniforms and donned blankets in protest. After the British retaliated by denying them bathroom privileges, they began smearing the walls of their cells with their own excrement.

In March 1981, Sands (who in the movie is Gerard's cellmate) began the hunger strike that ended 66 days later with his death. Less than a month earlier, he won a narrow victory over a Unionist candidate in a local election that generated furious political passions. His death made him an IRA martyr, and his funeral in Belfast drew 100,000 mourners.

As the film cuts back and forth between scenes of tight-lipped British officials and the prisoners euphorically uniting in solidarity against their captors, you have the queasy sense of a war of nerves spinning out of control. Once the hunger strike is in full swing, the movie doesn't shy away from showing the physical ravages of starvation.

The scenes in which the prisoners decide to step up their resistance and to die if necessary, are at once rousing and extremely sad. While the film gives both Sands (powerfully played by John Lynch) and Gerard a vaguely Christlike aura, it doesn't swooningly give its heart to them.

The perspective remains detached enough that one is forced to wonder why this game of lethal tit for tat had to escalate to such crazy extremes. At the same time, it conveys a chilling sense of forces so implacably antagonistic that only a miracle could reconcile their differences.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Some Mother's Son'' (R; strong language, violence).

The stars: Helen Mirren, Fionnula Flanagan, Aidan Gillen, David O'Hara and John Lynch.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Terry George, written by George and Jim Sheridan. Produced by Sheridan, Arthur Lappin and Edward Burke. Released by Castle Rock Entertainment.

Running time: One hour, 51 minutes.

Playing: Selected theaters, including the AMC Promenade in Woodland Hills.

Our rating: Four Stars.