PG-13 | 1h 53min | Drama, Comedy | 1987
If you’re familiar with cricket, you’ll have some inkling of the “googly,” a delivery that bowlers (in baseball, the pitcher) use to deceive batsmen (batters) by pretending to spin the ball one way, while spinning it the other.
British screenwriter-director John Boorman’s “Hope and Glory” is his cinematic googly. It pretends to be all sad and serious, while having a good laugh.
It uses the comedic analogy of a “game” or “play” to consider how we cope with catastrophe. In the film, the setting of that “game” is England during the Blitz of World War II, played principally through the eyes of 9-year-old Billy (Sebastian Rice Edwards) and his mom, Grace (Sarah Miles). Boorman based Billy’s experiences, loosely, on his own as a child in war-torn England….