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Irish War of Terror Blurs Good and Evil
Newsday
16 March 2007
By Jan Stuart
Chalk it up to coincidence, perhaps, that three of the past year's best films happened to be war pictures. On the surface, Clint Eastwood's Letters From Iwo Jima, Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory, and now Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley play by most of the rules as war films of yore. What's changed is the point of view: We are being asked to rejigger our hearts and minds to embrace those generally perceived by local audiences as the Other.
In Loach's jolting depiction of the Irish War of Independence of the early '20s (the Palme d'Or winner at May's Cannes Film Festival), the Other seems somehow closest to home. This may be attributable to the unique cultural/historical role of the Irish in America. More significantly, perhaps, is that Loach presents Ireland as a house divided, at a moment when our own nation is at odds over how to bring another war to a just and lasting conclusion.
The divisions that would wrack Ireland for the rest of the past century are personified in two fictionalized brothers, Damien and Teddy O'Donovan (a riveting Cillian Murphy and Padraic [sic] Delaney). Damien, a medical student when the film begins in 1920, is guided by intellect and pragmatism; Teddy, a former seminarian turned professional soldier, by stubborn force of will.
When a brigade of England's Black and Tan militia barnstorms their village and murders Damien's soccer buddy, the brothers find a common purpose in the Irish Republican Army, which has dedicated itself to wresting their country from British dominance.
For all his humanitarian career aspirations, Damien is compelled to take up arms against his loyalist neighbors and, in one of the film's most alarming sequences, execute a hapless local teenager who was strong-armed into ratting on IRA members. The psychic scars inflicted on Damien by this killing are ineradicable: When a truce is finally signed between England and the IRA, Damien finds himself painted into an ideological corner, trapped by the severity of his war deeds. Were these heroic gestures or the rabid acts of a terrorist?
Loach doesn't allow us to ask those questions about the English, who are merely fiends; any lingering smidgen of sympathy for the Black and Tans goes out the window when Teddy has his fingernails pulled off in a torture interrogation. But The Wind That Shakes the Barley is not anti-British agitprop, a knee-jerk accusation that was previously leveled at Loach's 1990 film Hidden Agenda.
Rather, Loach seeks to reveal the cruelties and compromises that war inevitably demands of all its participants. We are keenly aware of the anguish endured by many of the IRA soldiers after an ambush that wipes out a British entourage. After a truce is signed that yields little to Ireland in the way of independence, we find our sympathies divided along with those of Damien and Teddy, who split off into anti- and pro-government factions.
As in his best films (Land and Freedom and My Name Is Joe), Loach is at his most provocative during these discursive moments, when plain folk sit around in a room and debate the merits of a position. Folks who are heavily invested in stereotypes of thuggish terrorists may balk at Loach's portrait of articulate IRA ideologues. But there is no denying his ferocious grip on our emotions. Barley is one tough and beautiful film.
