Although the film captures the chaos and compromise of the realpolitik world of clashing ideals, interests, and ambitions, it's no accident that Sands and his followers in their beards and blankets evoke Christ and the apostles. And the televised visage of Margaret Thatcher condemning terrorists and defending her policies brings to mind Pilate, if not the devil himself. Such matters of good and evil aside, however, when Some Mother's Son keeps its politics in the family it brings justice and clarity to its murky and tragic subject, its intense drama shedding more light on the ordeal of Irish history than the vacant sweep of the recent Michael Collins does.

To a large extent, the filmmakers can thank Helen Mirren for that. As the fictional Kathleen Quigley (representing, perhaps, the real-life hunger-strike mother Catherine Quinn), a schoolteacher in Belfast who does her best to avoid her country's sectarian troubles and focuses instead on her family, Mirren conveys with her beautiful, haggard face the extraordinary beauty of the commonplace, the healing pain of an insignificant person discovering that she is, indeed, capable of significant acts.

That process begins when her son Gerard (Aidan Gillen) has caught the Feinian fever from his pal Frank Higgins (David O'Hara), an IRA leader. Both are captured after a nighttime ambush of a British unit in retaliation for a British crackdown. It's a small masterpiece of initiation, like the opening riot scene in In the Name of the Father as the exhilaration of momentary victory gives way to ignominious defeat.

Ignorant of her son's involvement, Kathleen first learns of the incident at the parochial school at which she teaches when she reluctantly comes to the defense of Theresa (Grainne Delany), Frank Higgins's sister. Distraught by her brother's fate, Theresa angrily condemns the British and is taken to task by the Loyalist Mother Superior (Doreen Keogh). Escorting the girl home, Kathleen has a brusque encounter with her mother, Annie (the superb Irish actress Fionnula Flanagan), a staunch IRA supporter whose other son was killed by British troops.

Kathleen learns the bad news, and what follows is the politicizing of the human tragedy and the humanizing of the political tragedy. When the prisoners refuse to wear prison-issue clothes until they are recognized by officials as prisoners of war, and the protests degenerate into feces-smeared walls and, finally, starvation strikes, Kathleen joins Annie in the Sinn Fein-organized demonstrations. When they are opposed by the soulless, ruthless bureaucrats of the system -- they are offered the tragic choice of either betraying their promise to their sons or letting them die -- and are abused by drunken Unionists, the picture seems in danger of becoming a diatribe. ("It's all right," says Annie when she is doused by louts in a passing car. "It's only piss.")

But Mother's Son (it is, after all, the same team that brought us that masterpiece of compassion and integrity, My Left Foot) has too big a heart to stick to such a polemical agenda. Like Kathleen herself, it is at best a tentative convert to the cause. In one wry and eloquent sequence, Kathleen takes Annie to the seaside to give her her first driving lesson. She's not a fast learner, and the rising tide soon bogs them down in the surf. A patrol of British soldiers appears over the rise. Until then figures of dread and hatred, they now are rescuers, and good-humoredly band together to haul the car out of the sea.

A metaphor for a Northern Ireland unable to extricate itself from its own mess and requiring assistance from its former masters? Most likely it is a simple statement of the inadequacy of categorization and the need to recognize common humanity. Begrudgingly, Annie acknowledges, "I don't hate all of them." Some Mother's Son, in the end, is a film that doesn't hate at all.