Web posted
April 26, 2007
How winds of war helped ignite Ireland's Troubles
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post
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| Courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes
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 Violence begets violence: Cillian Murphy, left, and Padraic Delaney play brothers involved in Ireland's Troubles in "The Wind That Shakes the Barley." |
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Seeing "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" forces you to confront the Irish and their famous Troubles. And you think, sadly: "What is wrong with you people?"
That's the tough question Ken Loach's brilliant new film takes up and, of course, can't answer, but it does make the inevitable point that violence begets violence, that oppression begets violence and that testosterone begets violence.
It looks at a different section of the famous battles of the early 20th century than the usual "Troubles" movies, including John Ford's classic "The Informer" of 1935. Unlike those movies, with their shadowy, foggy Dublin streets, this one is set far outside Dublin and recounts the escalating violence between the IRA squaddies and the Black and Tans, the brutal, repressive domestic police force the British put in place to put the former down.
We begin with the younger brother, Damien, sick and tired of the strife, trying to get out and go to America. He's played by Cillian Murphy, a pale beauty of a young man who has used that beauty ironically to portray psychos (as in "Batman Begins" or "Redeye"), but who here controls his bug-eyed mannerisms to etch a portrait of a gentle, even poetic young feller who doesn't want to follow the course of his older brother Teddy, a patriot and IRA gunman.
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Movie review
'The Wind That Shakes the Barley'
Rating: ★★★
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Padraic Delaney, Liam Cunningham, Gerard Kearney and William Ruane.
Director: Ken Loach
Parent's guide: R.
Running time: 2 hours, 7 mins.
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On his last day in the auld sod, however, Damien and his buds, sharing a farewell pint before he heads to America, are set upon by a group of Tans, and bullying soon becomes murder, as a young boy is shot for refusing to speak English.
Soon older brother Teddy (a dynamic performance by Padraic Delaney) arrives to galvanize the boys, and the angered Damien is lost. He's become a guerrilla fighter, with a Webley in his Burberry pocket and an Enfield at the ready. For a long middle section, the movie is almost pure guerrilla combat, as the squad strikes back by night, atrocity is exchanged for atrocity, and the war just gets bloodier and bloodier.
But if you know your Irish history, you know that the worst is yet to come. Most films represent the truce between the factions as an endpoint and fail to deal with the bloody civil war that followed it. Some IRA boys became the new government, committed to making a go of things by rules of the peace arrangement (which, among other things, led to the establishment of Northern Ireland, but that's another story). Some felt betrayed and soon became guerrillas fighting not the Tans but former friends and even their own brothers. History records, but few remember, that far more people died in the Civil War than in the storied, classic Troubles that preceded them.
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