‘Say Nothing’ Review: FX/Hulu’s Tale of the Troubles Is Powerful, Ambitious and a Little Too Scattered

Hulu’s FX-produced limited series Say Nothing, like its source book by Patrick Radden Keefe, takes its name from the striking 1975 poem “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” by Seamus Heaney. 

It’s a sad and angry piece that looks at the unfolding tragedy of the Troubles, critiquing simultaneously the culture of enforced silence that repressed free speech within Northern Ireland and the voyeuristic instincts of the outside media covering “the Irish thing.” The poem is dazzlingly focused on speech and storytelling, the power and limitations of words in contrast to what Heaney refers to as “Northern reticence, the tight gag of place / And times.”

Keefe’s mission, and the mission of Say Nothing creator Joshua Zetumer (RoboCop, the 2014 one), is to break through the silence. To use a different metaphor, it’s about the disinfecting power of sunlight. It’s also a chronicle of Northern Ireland reported on by an American journalist and adapted by an American screenwriter. Depending on your perspective, the drama either benefits from coming from outside of that “tight gag” or lacks the necessary bona fides. I can’t be the authenticity police on this.

Following Keefe’s structure in a way that maybe isn’t wholly suited to the limited series format, Say Nothing tries to tell three or possibly four stories at once, jumping between characters and perspectives and across decades. As potent as it frequently is and as necessary as it consistently is, the show can’t always reconcile all of its threads in a way that feels cumulative instead of scattered. Each of its narratives comes with a different imperative, and each is conveyed with a different level of success.

We’re first brought into this saga through Jean McConville (Judith Roddy), a mother of 10, who was abducted from her Belfast, Ireland, apartment in 1972, accused of being an informant for the British army and never returned. A child next door sees what happened, but one of the kidnappers stares her down with a finger to his lips — the first of many times that viewers will reminded of the imposing pressure of silence.

Stakes and mystery established, we meet Dolours (Lola Petticrew) and Marian (Hazel Doupe) Price, Belfast-born daughters of a renowned Irish republican (Stuart Graham’s Albert) and a mother (Kerri Quinn’s Chrissie) committed to the IRA’s Women’s Council, or the Cumann Girls.

Dolours and Marian start out wanting to show their support for the cause through peaceful protest, but quickly gravitate toward the more aggressive approach taken by the IRA, including rising firebrands Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle) and Gerry Adams (Josh Finan). That the real Adams has always publicly maintained he was never a member of the IRA necessitates a disclaimer at the end of each episode in which we watch Gerry participating in IRA activities. Storytelling comes in many forms — the stories we tell the public, the stories we tell ourselves and the way those stories have to be packaged and presented.

The sisters have no interest in being restricted to the women’s side of operations and so, with Brendan and Gerry’s approval, they’re soon getting involved in bank robberies and then bombings. Their journey is framed by Dolours’ testimony (Maxine Peake plays her as an older woman) as part of the Belfast Project, an oral history conducted through Boston College, which eventually had legal ramifications and contributed to the solving of the McConville case.

So you’ve got the kidnapping mystery, a reflection of a nation’s unhealed wounds and trauma, distributed throughout the nine-part series. But it’s not done in a way that really lets you know who Jean McConville or any of her children were, though when Laura Donnelly arrives mid-series as the adult version of one of the kids, her pained performance helps give that storyline a voice and a face. 

You’ve got Dolours and Marian, whose arc has shades of Goodfellas. It leans into the excitement for a pair of teenage girls of rising up the IRA ladder, emphasizing the fun and heist-style adventure of their revolutionary activities until the moment at which everything becomes dark and tragic. 

And then you have what might as well be called A Child’s First Guide to the Troubles, with Muppet Babies versions of Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams laying out exposition. The always welcome Rory Kinnear arrives and then vanishes as Brigadier Frank Kitson, leader of the British forces in Belfast. He tells stories about the end of the British Empire and points at maps of Belfast, more to inform viewers than his own troops.

The Brendan/Gerry stuff is necessary mostly for an outside audience who might require a rudimentary summary of history, as Say Nothing craves to be both A story of the Troubles and THE story of the Troubles. Gerry is inevitably a villain of the piece, a man who never utters a sincere word and whose beard always looks like it’s barely held on by adhesives. But this material plays like a Wikipedia entry, albeit one in which Boyle is sensitive and fiery and Finan is charismatically reptilian.

The plot with the Price sisters is easily the best part of the show. Pettigrew and Doupe are both excellent, especially in a midseason arc in which their fantasies of righteous insurgency run smack-dab into the nightmarish wall of the British legal system. But after the fifth and six episodes, which represented the series’ peak for me, the transition to older versions of the characters feels jarring and a bit anticlimactic. It fails to find a way to dramatize the disillusionment of thwarted aspirations and sold out dreams.

The glue holding these tales together should probably be the Belfast Project and the idea of an oral history that doubles as the secular equivalent of confession, a former IRA member with a recorder serving as priest. But the narrative device is never adequately integrated, and nor is the type of storytelling it generates interestingly interrogated.

At first, Say Nothing seems designed to unfold as livelier and probably more entertaining than you might expect. Zetumer and initial director Michael Lennox weave in shockingly funny notes of black comedy and grounded absurdity, while the editing, working around a terrific soundtrack of punk and rock tracks skewed toward acts with Belfast origins, zips along. You feel the zeal and embrace the zealotry.

Then the drama is supposed to get harrowing and even unwatchably bleak, as idealism is crushed by reality. Then it needs to cinch together into something emotionally rich, to convey the reconciling of memory and reality, of idealism and pragmatism. 

The first two steps work, even with momentum frequently blunted by the time-jumping and selective withholding of information. But despite an understanding of where the melancholic rumination comes from, the theme and plot don’t quite cohere in the third. Say Nothing is uncertain on how to make Jean McConville really come to life, leans on addiction clichés for the older versions of the Price sisters and can’t help but treat the iconic IRA men at a remove.

The empowering necessity of telling this story, and not adhering to codes of silence, is never in doubt. But the method by which it’s told doesn’t quite land.