THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY (Ken Loach, 2006)

“I tried not to get into this war, and did; and now try to get out, and can’t.” — Damien O’Donovan, in The Wind That Shakes the Barley

The Navigators (2001) marked Ken Loach’s highest attainment in a long career, but The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which won Loach the 2006 Palme d’Or at Cannes, surpasses it. It encompasses both post-World War I periods of conflict in Ireland, England’s oldest colony, the first (1919-1921), when Irish rebels sought freedom from British rule, culminating in the 1921 settlement establishing the so-called Irish Free State, and the second (1922-23), when Irish rebel holdouts contested this settlement for its compromises, leading to bloodshed between the two Irish factions. (Michael Collins led the Irish against the British in the first period and against those who embraced the Anglo-Irish Treaty in the second.) In effect, Loach’s film, which has been beautifully written by Paul Laverty, provides a grass-roots glimpse of the infancy of the Irish Republican Army. As Loach’s “what if” political thriller Hidden Agenda (1990) reminds us, the Irish have been fighting for their freedom for 800 years.
     The action begins in 1920. A spirited hockey match is a playful, ironical way of anticipating the bloody battle between two factions of the Irish, those supporting the 1921 treaty and those opposing it, towards which the film is headed. Post-match, all of a sudden Blacks and Tans materialize to terrorize the locals, murdering one boy for giving his name in Irish Gaelic rather than in English. (The Blacks and Tans, consisting of former British police officers, were the brutal force charged with “maintaining order” in Ireland by beefing up local forces.) In the main, The Wind That Shakes the Barley is about two brothers, Teddy and Damien O’Donovan, who are on the same side against the British but, later, post-treaty, on opposing sides. Once Damien is captured, Teddy, now an officer in the Irish Free State Army, pleads with his brother to betray the rebels; Damien refuses, and Teddy, steeling himself past overwhelming regret, has him executed. The film ends with Damien’s widow Sinéad furiously assaulting her brother-in-law, ordering him off her land (a thematically resonating command) and declaring her wish never to see him again for the rest of her days.
     It is Damien, a medical doctor, who is the film’s protagonist. What seals his determination not to compromise is that he drew the lot that required his executing a boy who had given information to the enemy. The long shot of Damien walking away after the terrible event, the fixed camera toward his back, his shoulders seized by a quick shudder, bares the torn heart of a healer who has just killed. Teddy pleads that they will tear up the treaty with the British once they are strong enough; but Damien cannot give in. It would cast his killing act to the senseless winds; it would break faith with all the Irish dead.
     Teddy also makes this plea: “You’re m—.” He cannot complete the sentence You’re my brother—in part because Laverty and Loach won’t let him. This is not a schematic film in which the conflict between O’Donovan brothers doubles for the larger political conflict. Laverty and Loach fold the fraternal conflict into the larger conflict, not vice versa. Nevertheless, a terrible irony abides throughout The Wind That Shakes the Barley: early on, Damien tries protecting his brother by saying that he, Damien, is Teddy. Indeed, it is Teddy who is partly responsible for drawing his younger brother into the armed fight against British injustice and occupation. What Damien sees going on all around him is also partly responsible.
     Cillian Murphy gives a great performance as Damien. As Teddy begs Damien in his prison cell to join forces with him once again, thus sparing his own life, Damien’s head is down, his eyes closed, until he raises his head and opens his eyes to tell his brother just why he cannot accommodate the Anglo-Irish Treaty, although he, too, longs for the peace that the settlement promises. What good is peace without liberty, without freedom? Damien has told Teddy that he, Teddy, has wrapped himself in the Union Jack. Britain’s colonial bent may mean that the political form of peace for Ireland must continue to fall short of the Platonic form, the ideal. When Damien’s tied-up body is downed by an Irish squad’s barrage of bullets, one hopes he at last has found peace; but one knows better. Irish patriots bleed sorrow even in heaven.

BREAKFAST ON PLUTO (Neil Jordan, 2005)

A labored picaresque farce that arrives after more than two hours at a point of remarkable and frustrating irresolution, Breakfast on Pluto would easily qualify as the worst film in almost anyone’s career, but the director here, Neil Jordan, earlier made Interview with a Vampire (1994), the clumsiest, dumbest, most boring vampire movie ever. Co-written by Patrick McCabe, the author of the novel on which the film is based and Jordan’s previous collaborator on The Butcher Boy (1996), Breakfast on Pluto does generate three or four chuckles but little pleasure apart from the nifty use of past popular songs on the soundtrack. This is a terrible movie.
     The film takes place in the 1970s. It follows an innocent young adoptee, Patrick Braden, back and forth between a small town in Ireland and London, where he goes in search of his biological mother. Nonviolent, he also flees Ireland after consigning a cache of IRA weaponry to the watery deep; it’s just Patrick’s luck that he is mistaken for an IRA member when the London pub he is visiting—this is based on an actual 1974 incident—is blown up. A cross-dresser, Patrick wants to be known as “Kitten”; along the way of his misadventures, he is protected by some—and never has a boy been more in need of protection—and assaulted by others. Still others, with differing degrees of awareness of Patrick’s gender, simply accept him as Kitten.
     Kitten does meet his mother, but she has a family of her own now, including another child on the way, and perhaps Kitten no longer is in such desperate need of her dreamt-of care and protection. It turns out that Kitten’s biological father is his Irish priest. “What should I call you?” Kitten asks him. The priest’s reply: “Father.” That is the kind of arch whimsical humor with which the movie is fraught.
     Wonderful Cillian Murphy endearingly mumbles his way through the self-bantering part of Kitten; he is not the problem with Jordan’s assinine film. Neither is the elegant and intricate mise-en-scène (the finest that Jordan has ever devised), except insofar as it is meaningless, merely decorative. That’s the core problem: the film is splashy, colorful, decorative, with odd little supernatural touches (including dreams and subtitled animated chirping birds), but essentially hollow because it falls way short of the mark of embracing the humanity of its outcasts: not just Kitten and his priestly pop, but the African-Irish girl whose baby Kitten comes to adopt. Jordan’s film trivializes the lives of all three, as well as the politics. It provides an astounding absence of context for the Anglo-Irish conflict. (Bloody Sunday, mind you, occurred in 1972!) Rather, it sentimentalizes everything, hoping vaguely for such a world as where everyone is free to pursue his or her idiosyncrasies. But the political implications of “going one’s own way,” at least for the Irish vis-à-vis the British, is soullessly discounted for the sake of cinematic embroidery and Chanel perfume—fringe foolishness; not the agony of blighted lives as British bullets rip out the hearts of Irish innocents as well as militarized opponents.
     Himself Irish, Jordan nevertheless couldn’t resist trying to stroke everyone in sight in pursuit of the widest possible audience, the most bucks. (Imagine a Jewish film that courted Nazi approval.) In one of the most despicable blows ever delivered by film, a thug-cop who beats the crap out of Kitten becomes one of his compassionate protectors. I swear, I’m not making this up!
     This is a film to be stomached by those who can stomach it. I hope that their number is small.