THE UGLY “TROUBLES” THAT BIRTHED
MODERN IRELAND
THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY
Directed by Ken
Loach; written by Paul Laverty; cinematography by Barry Ackroyd; editing by
Jonathan Morris; original Music by George Fenton; art direction by
Michael Higgins and Mark Lowry; costume design by Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh
With: Cillian
Murphy, Padraic Delaney, Liam Cunningham, Orla Fitzgerald, Roger Allam, Sean
McGinley, and John Crean. Not Rated. Running time: 127 minutes
Reviewed by Joel
Johnson
Director Ken Loach
is well known for his socialist leanings and has never been subtle in
illustrating injustices heaped upon the downtrodden. In the war for Irish
independence he has found a subject that allows him to fully embody his
quotation about the “British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and
conquest.” Since I write this on the day of the 2007 NFL draft, please allow
me to apply an American football term to Englishman Ken Loach’s filmmaking:
Smash-mouth. Smash-mouth football employs a transparently obvious strategy
of pitting strength against strength to knock back the defense to gain
yardage by physically carrying (running) the ball forward. Loach’s films are
the equivalent of this football strategy in their transparent. brutality.
With The Wind that Shakes the Barley, that brutality is particularly
ferocious and effective.
The film begins in
County Cork, Ireland, in 1920, with a scene of young men and teenaged boys
playing Ireland’s sport of hurling. After the game the players have the
misfortune of running into a patrol of British soldiers raiding homes
suspected of housing Irish Republican Army (IRA) sympathizers. When one of
the youth impudently refuses to give his name in English, the vicious
British sergeant has him killed in his own house while family and friends
are held at gunpoint just seconds away. Unlike many films set in wartime,
Loach shows the shocked horror and grievous pain caused by lives lost. This
sets the tone for 127 minutes of riveting, yet disturbing film viewing.
The main character
is Damien O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy), a bright young man planning a medical
career not unlike a certain well-known revolutionary named Ernesto “Che”
Guevara. While Damien’s brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney) is already an IRA
guerilla, Damien will be heading to London for his internship. Despite the
entreaties of his brother and his friends, Damien gets as far as the train
station on his trip to London. There he witnesses another act of British
brutality and stops to help the victims instead of boarding the train.
Damien is next seen taking the oath of allegiance to the Irish Republic and
joining the IRA.
One of the victims
that Damien helps is the train’s engineer Dan (Liam Cunningham), who joins
the same IRA unit. Dan becomes the film’s socialist conscience, maintaining
awareness on the exploitation affecting Irish workers and peasants. The
ideal of ending such exploitation often seems to run afoul of the
practicality of garnering sufficient resources to defeat the British.
However, it will eventually become clear that ending British rule and
kicking out the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy will not free the poor from being
mistreated.
We soon are
exposed to the same bellicosity issuing forth from Irish mouths that had
spewed from British ones. The words tumble forth harsh and violent even if
the exact meaning is swallowed up in the cacophony of heavy accents and
gunshots. This is no doubt part of a deliberate attempt to blur the
distinctions between the men on both side of the war. The fighters on both
sides share a common humanity, looking and sounding alike. There are few
signs of unique personality, and it was a challenge to keep all of the
characters straight. However, that is not the point. The point is that they
are truly the same even if they wear different uniforms and perpetrate
heinous savagery against each other. Despite the close quarters of
face-to-face violence, it is not personal but dictated by the cruel nature
of war and especially internecine war. Betrayal, treason, and treachery are
words that resonate over and over again in this conflict. The harshest
punishments are meted out for it, even if done so reluctantly.
While the film
takes us to an historical period during which Irish independence was forged,
the film seeks to show the dreadful horrors of war, especially when the
combatants are neighbors, have been friends, and even come from the same
family. As if this commonality with a particular war being fought in a
certain Middle Eastern country that begins with the letter I is not
transparent enough, there are scenes of soldiers forcing their way into
homes to find enemy fighters and contraband weapons that look nearly
identical to scenes we’ve seen repeated on scores of news broadcasts and
documentary films.
Loach and Laverty
have made a very compelling film that makes us feel the horrible choices
faced by the young men as well as the sense of devastation wrought by the
brutal violence. The former is well illustrated by the central performance
of Cillian Murphy as well as the other young men. John Crean is particularly
affecting in the small role of a young farm hand cruelly caught between both
sides. The latter is revealed by the women, both as direct victims and as
the aggrieved survivors of the dead. Orla Fitzgerald stands out as Sinead,
who suffers both as well as being Damien’s love interest to show a glimpse
of what young people should be focusing on. Barry Ackroyd’s cinematography
has captured the grays of stone and mist, the yellows of fields at season’s
end, and the brown of mud and dirt. This is not an Ireland with verdant
greens of growth and possibility, but an Ireland that is tired, bleak, and
hard.
The focus of the film eventually turns on the efforts to
resolve the festering conflict. The British offer the Irish Free State with
limited sovereignty within the British Commonwealth. The Irish would still
owe allegiance to the British crown. It offered a quick peace for all that
would save face for British. It serves as a wedge that divides the Irish
rebels into two camps—a strategy effectively employed repeatedly throughout
the British Empire—those who want peace even if it means still giving fealty
to the oppressors and those want to eliminate any vestige of British
influence. Interestingly, the reluctant guerilla Damien emerges from his
experiences more steadfast in the determination to end British oppression
once and for all while his initially more radical brother Teddy opts for the
Irish Free State compromise. It is these two different views of Ireland’s
future that lead to the film’s devastating climax.
The problem with
this resolution is that while Damien has been provided with a marginally
plausible arc of experiences that could explain his radicalization, there is
very little provided to explain Teddy’s willingness to move from a hard-line
position to soften and accept the Irish Free State compromise. In essence,
the script’s deficiency is exacerbated by casting one true star in Cillian
Murphy without a countervailing talent to fill the brother’s role. Padraic
Delaney is a stolid presence, but he is not able to match Murphy’s weight
even though he gives an understated performance. It doesn’t feel as though
the film’s resolution is the result of the organic development of the
characters as opposed to the machinations of the filmmakers.
That being said,
the smash-mouth filmmaking has worked to devastating effect. After being
battered by violence and witnessing pained mourning, it is hard not to
emerge from the theater drained. Loach, Laverty, and company show that war
is unremittingly ugly, and its outcome can be dire. This film premiered at
the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. The festival jury was moved by this bleak and
frightful story of Ireland’s war for independence from Britain to award it
the festival’s best film accolade, the Palme D’Or. One might expect that
this would be a harbinger of a successful theatrical run, however the Cannes
Film Festival has a history of recognizing films that tackle dark and grim
stories that often don’t attract robust audiences. Over the last several
years, the Cannes Film Festival has given its highest award to a film about
a petty criminal who sells his own son (L’Enfant), a film about a
fictionalized Columbine-like school shooting spree (Elephant), a
Jewish pianist trying to survive in Warsaw under the Nazis (The Pianist),
and a family coping with the death of a son (The Son’s Room). The
only comedy selected was Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, with its
heavily sardonic look at the Bush Administration and the Iraq War. That film
did attract a huge audience. The Wind that Shakes the Barley clearly
fits the mold for what juries at Cannes like. You may not like how it makes
you feel, but seeing it in the theater will rock you.
