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Movie review round up for Ken Loach's biggest hit
04 July 2006 at 10:54 PM | by Melty_Girl
[Note: This was originally published by cillianONLINE, which has been inactive since September 2006.]
RTÉ reports today that The Wind That Shakes the Barley is an Irish blockbuster to the tune of €887,000, making it Ken Loach's highest grosser ever. And according to Reuters, Barley held steady at #5 in the UK.
Here's a taste of the Barley reviews that have come out since my last overview. Sukhdev Sandhu of The Telegraph singles out Cillian for praise in her rave review of Barley:
Loach gets an excellent performance out of Murphy. A director who has no interest in making icons out of his cast, he allows the actor, who came to attention in 28 Days Later... (2002) and Batman Begins (2005) as much for his extraordinary looks as for the sophistication of his acting, room to breathe and to play his character as complex, haunted, multi-dimensional.
The central and bitter irony is that he's a man dedicated, or so he thought, to a life saving the lives of the weak and infirm. And now, he's guilty of shooting "traitors" in cold blood. The scene in which he does so is extraordinarily powerful, not just because of the paradoxes it reveals about revolutionary terror, but because of the tenderness with which Loach highlights the youth and weakness of the boy who has been accused of treachery. Single-handedly, this ensures that the film, intelligently scripted by Paul Laverty, could never be viewed as a pro-IRA manifesto.
A Thomas Crosbie Media review run by several Irish outlets gave Barley 5 out of 5 stars, as did Glasgow's Daily Record. Bloomberg.com called it "beautifully shot, strikingly acted, [with] a driving storyline that grips until the end." The Islington Gazette advised,
Ignore the controversy surrounding Ken Loach's new film about Irish republicanism, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and you'll find an emotional story about a major moment in history that has been all but forgotten.
But while Barry White of The Belfast Telegraph noted that Barley is "more anti-war than anti-Brit," he calls Cillian a "pin-up hero," wonders if there is historical proof for torture at the hands of the Black and Tans, and wishes that a more "subtle" director had made a movie about these events. The Galway Independent mused,
It's hard to see what all the fuss is about. As a film, The Wind That Shakes the Barley has a lot going for it. The acting, storyline and locations are all fine, as is the films pace and scope. However, the final product is far from what some quarters have lauded as a masterpiece of filmmaking and even further from what others have derided as repulsive.
Sinead McGovern at Ireland's Athlone Advertiser disagreed entirely:
This is one film that truly lives up to its own hype. Set in the beautifully wild Cork countryside, with exquisite attention to detail in costumes and set, it seems to transport the viewers back almost 100 years in time, to some of the most formative years of the Irish Republic. It boasts a stellar cast including the already, and deservedly, successful Cillian Murphy (with his finest Cork accent)... The best film of the year so far, without a doubt.
The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gave Barley a solid 3-star review:
It is not Loach's best film, but it is a fine and powerful drama, with relevant things to say about what happens when an occupying force withdraws. It is a film about anger and bitterness, but there are, as it happens, characteristic moments of gentle, unworldly Loachian humour, as when a boy on a bicycle brings news of the British ceasefire to the Republicans and loses the bit of paper with the vital facts... Barley is not just about how the British behaved, but about how the Irish behaved—and how they learned their behaviour in government both from their former imperial masters and from their masters' enemies. ...The film's final cadences are ones of misery and bitterness and rage, and all this, coupled with what is sometimes a slightly inert dramatic language, do not make for an easy watch. But it is a finely made, finely acted piece of work. For this, and for his remarkable and uncompromising career, Loach deserves his golden palm.
Cosmo Landesman at The London Times can't get past the politics:
The problem with Loach's more overtly controversial films... is that once the controversy they provoke dies down, the film tends to die with it. I suspect this will be the fate of The Wind That Shakes the Barley. ...What is missing is living, breathing characters. Somewhere in this polemic, real people are trying to get out and be part of the story, but they are always being pushed aside by Loach's political points.
But Jonathan Romney of The Independent said that Loach has made art of politics:
Commentators who engage most directly with the political substance of Loach's films often conveniently forget that they are cinema, and approach them as pure polemic—as witness the recent attacks by various columnists on his Cannes prize-winner The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Film critics, conversely, must to some degree assess the films independently of their content... ...Purely in terms of dramatic logic, the extremity makes the film into something very different from the historical reconstruction that it appears to be. It turns it into opera... ...The end is so intensely involving that had Cillian Murphy and Pádraic Delaney both burst into arias, it wouldn't have been surprising, nor weakened the film's dialectic. This is Loach's most provocative film in ages, and it's also among his most dramatically compelling. ...If Barley demands to be seen, it's as much for its poetics as for its politics.
Also wanting to delve beyond simply the political, Mark Kermode at The Observer wrote:
Allow me to start, therefore, by stating that The Wind That Shakes the Barley... is beautifully shot by Loach's longtime cinematographer Barry Ackroyd. The green fields, earth-brown interiors and darkening grey skies provide a striking counterpoint to the black and blue horrors of the war-torn narrative. Favouring natural light, and drawing our eye constantly toward the environment from which this tortured conflict is drawn, the visual imagery reminds us that, like Loach's terrific investigation of the Spanish Civil War, this is a tale of both land and freedom. ...Judged within the canon of Loach's work, Barley may lack the invigorating involvement of Land and Freedom (my favourite Loach film), but it is infinitely superior to the tiresome Hidden Agenda, which incurred a similar barracking.
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