A Song for Jenny

Director Brian Percival has done an absolutely wonderful job bringing Frank McGuinness' deeply moving screen adaptation of A Song For Jenny. It is beautifully done film recounting one mother's loss of her young daughter in the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London. It is a tragic story and at times painful to watch. Emily Watson is perfect in the role of the heart broken, angry parent and what she does in this film is overwhelming. Watson always does stellar work but this is something quite special. There are few if any other actresses who could so powerfully convey the intense emotion and terrible pain of such a horrible loss. Her eyes alone express so much and even in moments of silence, what she does in this role is almost miraculous.

The quality of British dramas are superior to our American movies. It is easy to get caught up and forget they are acting. This emotional story made me physically ill as I felt for the family.

For Emily Watson, this would be the performance of a lifetime, if she had not already given audiences such performances time after time. Her overwhelming brilliance has come to be routine and expected in every project in which she participates. That being said, this is simply an astounding portrait of a woman devastated by the senseless murder of her daughter by terrorists. Watson does not simply bring the emotional turmoil, the soul wrenching pain of a Anglican Vicar tested beyond the limits of faith, to vivid life. Somehow she makes the viewer share that agony and make it their own. It is one of the most deeply moving performances ever filmed and while the film is incredibly painful to watch, it is also an important cinematic memorial to those who suffered and lost so much on 7/7. This is more than a great actor doing her usual astounding work. This is a performance of historic proportions, so powerful and majestic that it can never be forgotten. A beautiful accomplishment by everyone involved in this staggering production and nothing less than a superbly delivered tribute to the broken hearted survivors of that tragic day by the amazingly gifted Ms. Emily Watson. She is the heart, the soul, and the very essence of A Song For Jenny.

I have just finished watching the second half of this drama – I watched the first forty minutes and was becoming overwhelmed by the continuous stream of emotion-filled almost-whispered sentences. However, my curiosity made me watch the second half, hoping for a development of the plot – which never came. It goes without saying that we all sympathise with victims of terror attacks wherever they occur, and I for one could not imagine the depth of the suffering of parents and loved ones – this sensation came through very effectively. This drama was very well cast, with some excellent acting, but let down by a weak plot. The fact that this tragedy somehow "just happened" is a typical media "half-of the story". There are reasons for most things in life, and this attack was no exception. By focusing only on the heart-breaking reaction of one family, the author of this drama has chosen to ignore the other side of the story – "why did it happen?" The programme would have been much more effective had it been longer and contained and compared a sub-plot of an equally-suffering family loss in the Middle East, North Africa or elsewhere in the world. It would be totally naïve to believe these attacks have no causes – surely a grieving relative would want to know why they are happening, but none of the characters seemed to care. Perhaps an entertaining piece of work for the Islamophobes of this world – with a clearly-identified Muslim perpetrator of the attack leaving viewers rightly angry with "Islamic terrorism", but hardly a balanced look at causes and effects of such attacks. I feel neither entertained nor informed. Come on, you intelligent authors and producers, stop pretending you can't see the dots - start joining them together and inform us the viewers in a more rounded way. Without stating what is obvious, even most politicians now recognise the roots of these terror attacks.

It was, by and large, a waste of superb acting and casting, in what could have been a much better ten-year memorial to those so sadly killed or injured.

To be honest, I struggled to get through this. I watched it almost out of a sense of duty, as I was a distant acquaintance of one of the victims of 7/7 (not Jenny Nicholson). The BBC usually handles this sort of thing rather well (they certainly assembled a decent cast), but not in this case. The whole thing was ponderous and ham-fisted, full of pregnant pauses and awkward silences (this is what passes for dramatic tension in our modern world). The lead character came out with portentous statements such as "these are my daughter's Stations of the Cross-I'm her mother-I shall be with her to the end", and "she didn't hate-nor must I", which hardly reconciled with her frustration with the authorities, and anger towards her daughter's murderer...

There was little in the way of character development, yet new additions were introduced all the time, leaving the audience to guess their relationship to the (not yet confirmed) deceased, and nothing to indicate the crisis of faith that the main character faced (she has since resigned her position as a C of E Parish Priest) in coming to terms with her dichotomy of conscience: her anger directed towards Mohammad Sidique Khan, the suicide bomber responsible for her daughter's death, and her duty of care and forgiveness as a priest.

The whole ensemble felt rushed, yet strangely drawn-out and impotent-it should have been explored in greater detail over a two-hour slot (after ten years, surely the BBC could have afforded to dedicate two hours on a Sunday night to the memory of these victims) instead of eighty minutes, and perhaps allocated some decent writers to the project-it felt like I was watching a screenplay written by pre-teens-they know they want to express the emotions of loss, anger, grief and resentment, but they don't really know how to it... I give it 6/10, with an exhortation to try harder next time!..