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Two leading American film critics review Barley
11 March 2007 at 11:53 PM | by Melty_Girl
David Denby in The New Yorker
Esteemed film critic David Denby reviews The Wind That Shakes the Barley in the 19 March issue of The New Yorker. Calling it "a beautifully realized work and perhaps Loach’s best film," Denby hones in on Loach's unfailingly honest look at violence, never stylized and choreographed like in so many films today. Of Cillian, Denby writes:
Cillian Murphy, with his full lips and fine-boned face—he was the charming, sinister seducer in the neat little thriller Red Eye and the sweet cross-dresser in Breakfast on Pluto—might seem to be an odd choice for a revolutionary, but the point about Damien is that he’s a mild man who has been groomed for a refined life ... only to get dragged into war. Murphy is normally very quiet in movies; he has attained his mystique as an actor by staring at people with baby-blue eyes. [Here too he has] a deep stillness, but he has idiosyncratic moments as well, such as when Damien has to execute a teenager who has ratted on the I.R.A. Murphy, writhing, shoots the boy and stumbles away, nausea struggling against duty.
Andrew Sarris in The New York Observer
Former Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris reviews Barley in the 12 March edition of The New York Observer. Sarris notes that Barley is unique among films about Irish history for including in the story the socialists involved in the fight for independence. He also mentions one of my favorite aspects of the film's realism:
The small-scale scenes of violence in this conspicuously pastoral film make up in excruciatingly loud yelling and howling what they lack in massive, effects-driven spectacle.
While Sarris does give the movie high praise, he finds its "symmetry of suffering" ending to be perhaps too pessimistic.
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