It's telling that, in a recent interview with the activist filmmaker Ken Loach, we asked him to tell us about his next movie. His response: "It's about the plight of migrant workers in East London."
Not "it's about two young migrant workers who fall in love against the backdrop of exploitation," etc.
We may read too much into that response, but it really does seem that this dogged didacticist has his priorities in a particular order, and issues tend to come first.
To that extent, The Wind That Shakes the Barley is Loach's "IRA movie." It is a wonderfully shot, easy-to-follow primer for those of us who may find the history of "the troubles" in Ireland confusing and byzantine. But it is strangely emotionally low-key and uninvolving, considering the rending of families and the blood, pain and death depicted in this brother-against-brother struggle, circa 1920s.
Look no further than the central character, Damien (Cillian Murphy), who is bound for medical school when we meet him, ambivalent to the nascent Irish Republican Army in which his brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney) serves against the occupying forces of the British Black And Tans.
Two acts of British brutality change things -- the beating death of a pub-mate in front of his own mother, and the beating of a conductor and engineer who, citing union rules, refused to allow Black And Tans to hitch a ride on a train.
This is a sea change in Damien's mind that he should be allowed time to agonize over. Instead it spins on a cinematic dime. People's opinions and feelings change mid-stream in The Wind That Shakes the Barley, sometimes almost as afterthoughts. Damien and Sinead, a local Irish Republican functionary, fall in love in the last act though they've known each other all their lives -- the better to put an easy emotional underscore on Damien's peril as an IRA gunman.
Interestingly, one of the few emotionally redolent scenes in the movie is a description of walking with a mother to the body of her son, who'd been executed as a traitor to the cause. Women, thus, seem like little more here than a useful device for hasty emotional button-pushing.
Loach is much more adept at painting villains -- even if the cause is murky by the end.
I can't think of a movie that has painted the British so grotesquely since Mel Gibson made The Patriot. A prison-torture scene, in which Teddy has his fingernails pulled, is particularly grisly. Not saying any of this is untrue, but when it comes time for a Black And Tan to show human feeling, it happens to be an Irish conscript.
At least a defined villain gives the first half of The Wind That Shakes the Barley a dramatic focus, and an energy that propels our young Gaelic guerillas to their place in history. It's in the last half, with a truce and the creation of the Irish "Free State" that Loach's task becomes more complicated.
Essentially, he has to starkly portray the supposition that the breakaway IRA -- which rejects the deal with the British and takes the fight to the North -- were true early-20th-Century progressives and socialists, while the Irish citizenry that voted for it were reactionaries voting for the status quo, the landowners and businessmen.
By the end, there are no heroes and villains, only victims. And that, at least, is a truth above politics.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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