NAB
Much of the pleasure of watching The Banshees of Inisherin comes from the chemistry of its lead actors but critics wouldn’t be going nuts for this film if it were just a trivial confection of pub banter.
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Writer-director Martin McDonagh has fused his trademark dark
humour with something all together more profound about the nature of
friendship, creativity and mortality.
It follows a soured
friendship between the cheerful but dim Pádraic (played by Colin Farrell) and
the more tortured, artistic Colm (Brendan Gleeson), who summarily tells Pádraic
one morning that he no longer wants to be pals. Over the course of the film,
Pádraic’s initial bafflement curdles into resentment, and Colm’s attempts to
stay away from him in their tiny community fail repeatedly.
On the face of it,
a relationship breakup is a thin plot on which to hang a film, but this was McDonagh’s
starting point.
“I just wanted to tell a very simple break up story,” he
told Deadline.
“And to see how far a simple comedic and dark plot could go.”
For all its comedy, the drama is best described as a
melancholic ballad. McDonagh, who won
best screenplay at the Venice film festival , says he tried to
imbue the friends’ breakup “with all of the sadness of the breakup of a love
relationship… because I think we’ve all been both parties in that equation,” he
told The Guardian. “And there’s something horrible about both
sides. Like knowing you have to break up with someone is a horrible, horrible
thing as well. I’m not sure which is the best place to be in.”
Depicting that sadness accurately was his intent, he
explained to AV
Club: “It was about painting a truthful picture of a breakup, really. A sad
breakup, a platonic breakup, which can be as heavy and sad and destructive as a
divorce, as a sexual or loving relationship coming to an end.”
There’s more to the film than this. Setting the story in
Ireland in 1923, with the Irish Civil
War playing out in the background, is a metaphor that spins the tale a
wider web.
“You don’t need any
knowledge of Irish history,” McDonagh told The
Atlantic’s David Sims. “All you
need to know, really, is that [the civil war] was over a hairline difference of
beliefs which had been shared up until the year before. And it led to horrific
violence. The main story of Banshees is that, too: negligible
differences that end up, well, spoiler alert, not in a good place.”
The one-time friends’ divide spirals into violence so
quickly that the original relatively mild cause for dispute is forgotten. “I
think that’s what was interesting about this story, that things unravel and get
worse and worse, sometimes without, oftentimes without intending to,” McDonagh
told Uproxx,
“And then become unforgivable and irreparable. And I guess that’s true of wars
as much as is true of this little story about the two guys.”
There are other layers too. Not least of which is what IndieWire
fingers as McDonagh’s “deep questions
about national identity” including his own. Despite writing Irish characters
(in this film and his debut In Bruges) and setting previous theater plays in
the country, McDonagh hails from London, although his parents are indeed from
west coast Ireland.
McDonagh’s last
movie set in the country was the 2004 short Six Shooter, which won an
Academy Award. McDonagh’s first trilogy of plays, starting with ‘The Beauty Queen of Leenane’ in 1996, took place in Galway and his second trilogy —
which was unfinished — took place on the Aran Islands; Banshees was shot on
Inishmore and Achill, two islands off Ireland’s west coast.
Inisherin
itself is fictional, partly to put the real events of the civil war at one
remove from the events on screen, and also because he and cinematographer Ben
Davis, use the landscapes of two islands to convey the dueling personalities of his two main characters: They
shot Colm’s home on Achill Island, where the rugged terrain matched his mood;
the less sophisticated Pádraic had his scenes shot in Inishmore, which is
comparatively flatter.
“All in all, it certainly
seems like McDonagh wants to grapple with the history and personality of the
country after setting it aside for almost two decades,” notes IndieWire.
At the same time,
his depiction of Ireland risks backlash. “There’s a certain degree of unease in
Ireland about McDonagh’s post-modern, heightened versions of Irishness,” Irish
film critic Donald Clarke told IndieWire. “The films and plays do well here. But there is a tension in Ireland
about his treatment of the country.”
Critics also points to supposed southern stereotypes in his
Oscar nominated Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. IndieWire
points out that McDonagh was often
lambasted on the promotional tour of that movie for depicting a racist police
officer (Sam Rockwell) with some measure of empathy.
“His characters are
exaggerated to an almost allegorical degree in order to comment on the society
around them, which has led some American audiences to see his view of the
country as naïve,” writes Eric Kohn. “Banshees burrows into the stereotype of Irish people
at pubs, guzzling pints to the tune of ebullient folk music, and molds it into
an emotionally resonant character study.”
That character study is also linked to a meditation on death
– and how an artist should make best use of their time. In the film, Colm is a
musician and wants to use the rest of
his days creatively, rather than sitting in the pub with Pádraic talking
nonsense. Which raises several questions, including: do you have to be selfish
and cruel in order to create? Can an artist be nice?
That is accompanied with a threat: If Pádraic doesn’t leave him alone, then Colm will start lopping off his own fingers.
“I thought it was
interesting that an artist would threaten the thing that allows him to make
art,” McDonagh said. “Does that thing make him the artist?”
It’s clearly something that preys on McDonagh’s mind. “I’m 52. You start thinking, Am I
wasting time? Should I be devoting all my time, however much is left, to the
artistic?” he told Sims. “That’s something that’s always going on
in my head—the waste of time, the duty to art, all that. So you start off being
on [Pádraic’s] side and understanding the hurt, but you have to be completely
truthful to the other side … You should feel conflicted.”
McDonagh says decided that he’s going to spend what creative time he has left – he reckons
“around 25 years” – making films rather than plays. His reasoning? Films are
quicker.
“I always used to
think they took longer than plays, but with this one we were filming it a year
ago, and now it’s out,” he says in the Guardian interview. “But if you’re lucky
enough to have successful plays,
…to get that right with each
move, to cast it and take care of it, go to rehearsals, that’s five years of
your life.”
It was also clearly nagging at him to unleash the genii of
Gleeson and Farrell’s chalk and cheese interplay that audiences lapped up in
cult hit In Bruges (2008).
“It feels like it was
two days ago that we made In Bruges together but time passes so quickly,” he said in
response to The Playlist wondering if they’ll be a third collaboration.
“None of us are getting any younger. I don’t have an idea now, but just that
little ticking bomb is somewhere in me. So, I do want to get them back
together.”
In Banshees,
McDonagh reunites the pair only to break them up in the first scene “a delectable bit of cruelty for the
audience,” observes Sims.
Although he made In Bruges to his satisfaction the
director apparently faced pressure from execs at Focus Features at every turn.
He now insists on final cut and got on
Banshees, a movie produced by the Disney-owned Searchlight. IndieWire
points out that his four movies have
all been made for around $15
million, a manageable scale by studio standards that lets McDonagh get away
with creative freedom.
“That is the reason
why the films are singular,” he said. “It is all me. It hasn’t been watered
down, for good or bad.”
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