 |
| Moved
to violence: Murphy in The Wind That Shakes the Barley. |
Blood
Brothers
By Ann Morr
The
Wind That Shakes the Barley
Directed
by Ken Loach
British social-activist filmmak-er Ken Loach (My Name Is
Joe, Raining Stones) isn’t especially popular in
the United States, and that may not change just because of
The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a period piece with
gorgeous cinematography and a pretty-boy lead. But it should.
Winner of the 2006 Palme d’Or at Cannes, TWTSTB is
a devastating, haunting, and remarkably even-handed treatment
of the Irish “troubles” of 1920. In it, Loach and his frequent
collaborator, screenwriter Paul Laverty, present an epic-sized
yet harrowingly intimate portrait of a watershed year in the
bloody struggle for Irish independence. Set in rural County
Cork, the film follows the diverging ideological paths of
two fictional brothers known as the O’Donovan boys, whose
village is invaded by a British militia sent to quash the
emerging clout of Sinn Fein. Teddy, the older O’Donovan (Padraic
Delaney), is a reckless Republican guerrilla. His younger
brother, Damien (Cillian Murphy), is a medical student soon
to leave for an internship in London. Damien is derailed—literally,
at a train station—by an incident of brutality by the “occupying
force.”
We first see the brutality of the “black and tan” regiment
during the opening sequence, when Damian and his village friends
are accosted for playing rugby, a violation of an edict prohibiting
“meetings.” Ordered to strip by the Brits, Damien remains
preternaturally calm, even as another youth refuses and mouths-off
in Gaelic. The youth is quickly beaten to death in front of
his mother. Damien is radicalized by the killing, and his
quietly escalating fury is indicated by little more than an
almost imperceptible hardening of his wide blue eyes (this
is a career-making performance by Murphy, best known in Hollywood
as the hunky psycho from Red Eye). Damien joins his
brother’s rebel faction in furtive warfare against the militia,
a decision that will bring him into tragic conflict with everything,
and everyone, he knows, including the dead boy’s sister (Orla
Fitzgerald), a sympathizer who falls in love with him.
An innocently dim-witted schoolmate betrays the faction to
the village patriarch, a gentleman farmer who, somewhat understandably,
sides with the civilized British against the seemingly anarchic
Republicans. At one point, the aristocrat rails against his
“priest-infested backwater,” and his invective is borne out—the
Republicans retaliate with a savagery that surpasses that
of the British, an act that sinks the faction into a moral
quagmire. The consummate screenplay invests this local, pastoral
rebellion with hot points ranging from the role of the Catholic
Church (martyrdom and everlasting glory make death easier)
to the plight of British soldiers who have no stomach for
their orders: In a wrenching encounter between Damien and
an ambivalent captor, he is made to realize that some of these
soldiers are veterans of the trenches of World War I.
And then Michael Collins brokers a peace treaty that splinters
the rebels into mutinous outlaws and divides the brothers
as Damien becomes a hard-line socialist and Teddy rises in
the hierarchy. The illuminating, heartbreaking dialogue and
plotting is augmented by the poignant use of traditional ballads
such as the title song. The acting is uniformly compelling
right down to the smallest roles, such as the stoical nana
who remembers the Famine when her cottage is burned. Yet despite
its lush historical naturalism, TWTSTB is unnervingly
up-to-date in its evocation of the horrors of righteousness—whatever
the cause and wherever the country.
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