The Wind That Shakes the Barley
From Ken Loach, the gifted realist filmmaker and committed socialist, I expected a rigorous recreation of the early Irish struggle for independence. I did not, however, expect a Shakespearean tragedy of brothers turned against one another. “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” is almost unbearably powerful, and it masterfully integrates an exploration of colonialist divide-and-conquer strategies into the relationship between its two main characters, Damien O’Donnell (Cillian Murphy) and his older brother, Teddy (Padraic Delaney). The setting is western Ireland in 1920. As we’re introduced to them, Teddy is a militant Irish Republican Army insurgent; Damien is a pacifist medical student preparing to decamp for London. But a vicious, unprovoked raid by the notorious “Black and Tans,” the British “peacekeeping” forces, leaves Damien unable to ignore the atrocities being committed against his people. He joins the IRA, and he and Teddy become effective insurgency leaders. But circumstances force Damien to do more nasty chores for the IRA than Teddy does, and his leftist politics and increasingly committed nationalism begin to alienate him from his brother. Then comes the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which established the so-called Irish Free State — not quite a republic, but an arrangement that carries the promise of peace. Teddy accepts the treaty and Damien rejects it, arguing that it creates a puppet regime and sells out republican ideals by forcing the Irish to retain King George V as their sovereign. Teddy joins the new domestic police force, while Damien continues to fight for the IRA. Thus the tactics of the British manage to tear apart two brothers who love each other and only want freedom for their people.
I hope this summary doesn’t make the movie sound dry and schematic. “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” has a soul-stirring immediacy. Loach is no whiz-bang moviemaker; he wants the content, not the camerawork, to awaken your emotions. His straightforward, uninflected visual style and his use of recurring settings and points of view lead to images of incredible potency. In particular, the home of Damien’s love interest, Sinead (Orla Fitzgerald) and her extended family becomes the site of several terrible turning points, beginning with that initial raid by the Black and Tans, in which Sinead’s brother is murdered for refusing to say his name in English. Loach stages guerrilla raids and political debates with equal dynamism. And he has a committed and resourceful actor in Murphy, who creates one of the great, uncompromising movie heroes in recent years. Damien is never superhuman; you always believe him, particularly when he’s overcome by rage or sorrow. And yet he’s clearly a great man, and Loach and Murphy are unafraid to see him as such.
For outsiders like me with only a superficial understanding of Irish republicanism, “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” stands as a bracing corrective. It shows how the violence that plagued that beautiful country for most of the 20th century had an entirely political genesis. It wasn’t Catholics-vs.-Protestants; it was freedom fighters against imperialists. (No wonder the movie, which won the Golden Palm at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, has been met with such a hostile response in Britain.) The fight became brother-vs.-brother, as the movie shows, but only as a result of politics. The Brits managed to change the tenor of the debate so that they weren’t the visible bad guys anymore. Instead, the struggle continued between those who wanted to be entirely free and those who were content to be mostly free. This movie traces the history of what became the Republic of Ireland — the Irish Free State ended in 1937 — but I can’t imagine things were much different in Northern Ireland, where IRA bombings remain a jarringly recent memory.