Tell Everyone About Say Nothing

Photo: Copyright 2024, FX. All rights reserved.

Midway through the first episode of Say Nothing, Dolours Price encounters a fiery scene in West Belfast: a mob of Northern Irish citizens chucking petrol bombs at a police barracks. A gawky, bespectacled young man directs the violence. “Wee Gerry has come a long way since debate club,� Dolours’s sister, Marian, notes. “Wee Gerry� is Gerry Adams, a childhood friend of the Prices who now plays a pivotal role in the Provisional Irish Republican Army. “Evening, child,� he says, striding up to the much smaller Dolours. “Don’t call me child, you jumped-up wee prick,� she retorts, not missing a beat. “You’re a year older than I am.� Arms crossed, Dolours locks her gaze and keeps her chin high in defiance of the towering Adams. The woman who would go on to lead the Provisional IRA’s first major attack on London is barely an adult, but she’s hungry to seize the world.

As a portrait of young revolutionaries, Say Nothing crackles with the thrill and romance of committing one’s life to an armed cause. Adapted from New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction best seller of the same name, the nine-episode FX miniseries runs the Troubles — the conflict between British occupiers and freedom fighters that consumed Northern Ireland for most of the second half of the 20th century — through the specific experiences of four PIRA members battling the British for a free and united Ireland. Dolours Price (an electric Lola Pettigrew) and her sister, Marian (Hazel Doupe, conveying a stormy interiority behind a still face and giant eyes), join the organization after enduring a brutal attack by counterprotesting British loyalists during a nonviolent march. Adams (Josh Finan) serves as a key strategist who would go on to play a pivotal and controversial role in ending the violence decades later, while his friend Brendan Hughes, played by a terrific Anthony Boyle, leads attacks on loyalists and armed forces across West Belfast. But the series also grapples with deep wells of complication around the costs of political violence, even when it’s carried out in the name of a just cause. That tension between righteousness and reckoning drives Say Nothing, which labors to maintain an empathetic view of how it feels to fight in a revolution, to live with its weight, and to be caught in the crossfire.

Led by showrunner Josh Zetumer, with a writers’ room composed of Joe Murtagh, Claire Baron, and Kirsten Sheridan, Say Nothing plows through set pieces with a lightness that mimics the fire of youthful conviction in its early stretch. The Price sisters stick up a bank while disguised as nuns, then giggle as they flee the scene; Dolours plays driver in a gun-running operation, where she flirts with a border guard to get past a security check; Brendan Hughes barrels through a quiet neighborhood to evade British soldiers, the camera capturing him from above as he weaves through alleyways with daredevil flair. You never forget these revolutionaries were kids during the heat of this action: Dolours spends the night before she plants bombs across London watching a West End play, wide-eyed and overwhelmed with the nightlife of the city she’s set out to attack. Afterward, when the Price sisters and their confederates attempt to flee the country, an unmistakably childlike terror consumes their faces.

But even within the excitement of its opening half, Say Nothing’s highs are conditional. The plight of the core group is threaded with scenes revolving around the McConville family, whose matriarch Jean is taken by the IRA one night in 1972. The truth behind her abduction steadily trickles out across the season, but the way her children are torn apart is made apparent from the beginning. The household is barely making ends meet in the series’ opening sequence, and after Jean’s disappearance, the siblings are cruelly separated by the British bureaucratic state. In its second half, Say Nothing dramatically slows down to transition into a meditation on the messy costs that comes with war. The McConvilles’ efforts to determine Jean’s fate and locate her remains, led by eldest sister Helen (Lauren Donnelly), shifts to the series’ fore, taking up equal space with scenes of the PIRA members growing older and diverging in fates. Some stay resolute to the cause, others are haunted by their actions in the past. Still others disavow their histories in a bid to seek political power.

Say Nothing is less interested in the structure of political violence than it is in the specific emotional experience of engaging in that violence. The series streamlines much of the larger historical context and can feel claustrophobic as a result — in excluding a full picture of what British occupation materially meant in the day-to-day of West Belfast, the series fails to communicate the scale of what this history means to the region. But the show ultimately weaponizes that claustrophobia to its benefit. The bravura sixth episode depicts the Price sisters, incarcerated for detonating a car bomb in central London, stage a hunger strike in order to be moved into a prison back in Northern Ireland. Their campaign ran for more than 200 days, and Say Nothing realizes the extreme nature of their effort by sticking agonizingly close to the sisters’ deterioration. The camera zeroes in on Dolours’s distress as she gags through force feedings day after day, pulls the teeth from her mouth, and sheds mass from her body, shrinking the perspective of the series down to the isolation of her prison’s walls.

The passing of time is central to the grand effect of Say Nothing. A magisterial Maxine Peake plays an older Dolours, whose interviews for an oral history of the Troubles function as a framing device in the opening episodes, and maintains Pettigrew’s effervescence. In an early scene, she discusses how she was recruited into the IRA, “Like one of those women who walks down the street and some fella from some modelin’ agency says, ‘Hey, I’m sending you to Milan!’� she laughs. But by this point in Say Nothing’s timeline, the weight of Dolours’s history has left its mark. The old revolutionary delights her chronicler with wit and charm, yet a wary distance never leaves her eyes.

There’s no way around it: Watching Say Nothing provides a surreal through-the-looking-glass experience as conflicts between occupiers and the occupied — especially Israel’s ongoing assault of Gaza — continue to rage around the world, not to mention as the United States drifts into another Trump presidency that promises some degree of authoritarianism. And yet, there’s nothing exceptionally timely about Say Nothing’s subject matter. Questions about the nature of political violence are as universal and timeless as those of truth and justice. For its part, the series maintains the book’s journalistic distance when it comes to making statements about the morality of armed struggle. Would the Good Friday Agreement ever have come to pass without the violence the IRA precipitated? Was the IRA’s fight a just one? A Hollywood-produced television show is not the right platform to engage with these questions. But what this adaptation fosters, much like the book it’s based on, is a consideration and understanding of the people who engage in such violence, while never losing sight of the ones who also suffered its casualties.