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A Terrible Beauty
The Daily Californian
5 April 2007
By Louis Peitzman
The Wind That Shakes the Barley Does Best As Character-Driven Drama
The struggle for Irish independence has been immortalized in countless novels, films and poems—stories that dramatize the stirrings of desire for a free Irish state and the bloody revolution that followed. In one of the most famous, W.B. Yeats declared, “A terrible beauty is born,” and The Wind That Shakes the Barley echoes the sentiment; it is at once stunningly beautiful and terribly bleak.
The film takes place four years after Yeats’ Easter 1916 rebellion, but the battle is the same. After a friend is beaten to death for refusing to cooperate with an officer, Damien (Cillian Murphy) puts aside his medical career to fight against the oppressive British presence in Ireland. Along with his brother Teddy (Padraic [sic] Delaney), he becomes part of the guerilla forces that will one day be known as the IRA.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley has garnered its fair share of controversy for portraying the volunteer army as patriotic heroes. The British, by contrast, get the short end of the stick. Their “Black and Tan” squads are so needlessly antagonistic that a violent, vigilante response seems almost inevitable.
It’s not the story we’re used to seeing, but that doesn’t make it any less valid. Last year Clint Eastwood gained recognition by showing the same war from opposing sides in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Here director Ken Loach does something similar, offering a new perspective on an old conflict. Though not always pleasant, seeing the issue from the less popular side can only better our understanding of the motivations behind the struggle.
Regardless of what you believe, The Wind That Shakes the Barley leaves a lasting effect. It wavers between scenes of familial warmth and images of shocking brutality and violence, rarely pausing to let the audience catch its breath. Occasionally the film is almost too painful to watch—an early torture scene is particularly graphic—but the connection that the audience forms with the characters makes it nearly impossible to turn away.
The emotional center of The Wind That Shakes the Barley is undoubtedly the relationship between Damien and Teddy, and the best scenes are those that test the bond. From the moment Damien tries to take the blame for Teddy, their link is what holds an otherwise scattered film together. When that link is broken, the film falters by shifting its focus away from the brothers and getting mired in the politics behind their dispute. After a treaty with the British divides the Irish nationalists, the movie spends too much time on political debate instead of on the irreparable rift between Damien and Teddy. But the brutal conclusion is the film’s saving grace, reflecting the heartbreaking sacrifices that both sides must make and the aftermath of those choices.
Delaney gives a strong performance as Teddy, struggling to reconcile his desire for peace with his duty to Damien, but it is Murphy who really impresses. Throughout The Wind That Shakes the Barley, he conveys the selfless determination necessary to make his character the most compelling and sympathetic on the screen.
The characters are what make The Wind That Shakes the Barley so effective—they humanize the story and mange to bring an epic struggle down to a few memorable figures, without making it feel any less pertinent. By the end, the debates seem secondary, and it is the humanity that resonates long after the politics fade away.
