C+

The second installment of Shooting Gallery’s immensely valuable series, bringing quality independent films to selected Loews Theatres throughout the country for two-week runs (for further details, check out http://movies.yahoo.com/sgfilmseries), kicks off with a well-made but overly familiar tale of violence and its impact on family life in the Northern Ireland of the early 1970s. Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Mary Costello, “Titanic Town” focuses on Bernie McPhelimy (Julie Walters), a middleaged housewife so exhausted by the necessity of raising her four children in a virtual war zone that she reluctantly becomes the leader of a Catholic women’s peace movement, earning the enmity of the IRA and its local supporters for taking an even vaguely even-handed approach to the situation. (The character is based upon Costello’s mother Tess.) Bernie’s activism worsens the health of her long-suffering, frightened husband Aidan (Ciaran Hinds) and leads to the virtual persecution of her children by many of their erstwhile friends; the emphasis here is on Bernie’s eldest daughter Annie (Nuala O’Neill), who struggles to come to grips with her feelings, including a first romance with college boy Dino (Ciaran McMenamin), while trying to survive in the increasingly hostile environment of her school.

This is the sort of tale about The Troubles which, to be entirely candid, we’ve seen on screen more than once before. The story arc is fairly predictable, and the juxtaposition of Annie’s search for maturity with Bernie’s search for some resolution to the violence is a pretty obvious dramatic tactic. Nonetheless “Titanic Town” is notably strong in a couple of respects. One is the atmosphere of matter-of-fact terror which director Roger Michell manages to sustain over the two-hour running-time. The milieu of the tormented Andersontown area of West Belfast is caught very effectively, with an occasional moment of humor (as when Bernie chases an IRA gunman out of her front yard) and, even more powerfully, a periodic burst of abrupt horror: the accidental shooting of Bernie’s friend Mary McCoy as the woman walks one of Bernie’s sons home has an immediacy that’s quite shattering.

Secondly, the performances are for the most part excellent. Julie Walters, much changed from her Oscar-nominated comic turn in “Educating Rita” nearly two decades ago, brings extraordinary shading to Bernie, catching her nervousness as well as her straightforward courage. Hinds is equally fine as her world-weary spouse; it’s somewhat astonishing that this bent-over, broken-down figure of a man is the same actor who was so virile and healthy as Captain Wentworth in Michell’s superb 1996 adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Persuasion.” Newcomer O’Neill brings considerable pathos to young, impressionable Annie, and the remaining McPhelimy children are nicely played by James and Barry Loughran and Elizabeth Donaghy. On the other hand, McMenamin boasts an Irish brogue which doesn’t seem consistent with his once being described as an American student, and Jaz Pollock overdoes things rather strenuously as the most vocal and abusive of Bernie’s IRA-minded neighbors.

“Titanic Town” (the title, incidentally, derives from the fact that the locale is the site where the Titanic was built) may be worth seeing for its acting and the skill with which it recreates a tumultuous time in Northern Ireland. But it’s hardly in the same league as “Persuasion,” and its interlinked stories of a mother putting her life on the line in pursuit of peace and of her daughter’s coming-of-age will likely strike you as commonplace, however well-intentioned the purpose and well-crafted the telling.