Butler's Cinema Scene

Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell

“THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN” My rating: B (In theaters)

109 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Audiences are going to love Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin”  — right up to the point where they start to hate it.

McDonagh is not the sort of filmmaker to chuck his audience under the chin and send us off with a pat on the head.  His protagonists  (like those played by Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) are often brittle/bitter or comically hateful, and he relishes nudging us in one direction only to see us ricochet off unforeseen developments.

The impeccably-acted “Banshees…” pushes that alienation to its utmost.

The film starts out feeling almost like a sequel to John Ford’s “The Quiet Man.”  This is a 1920s Ireland of horse-drawn carts and thatched roofs, a scape of land and sea so beautifully captured in Ben Davis’ cinematography as to exude postcard perfection.

There’s a plethora of Irish “types”: the chatty pub keeper, the omen-spouting old lady who looks like Death in “The Seventh Seal,” the small-town copper who sheathes his brutality in brisk protocol, the village idiot.

For its first hour or so, “Banshees…” plays like a melancholy comedy, a sort of Gaelic Chekhov punctuated by hilarious exchanges (not that the participants think of themselves as hilarious…that’s for the us to pick up).

And then after that alluring beginning the film becomes incrementally more dark and alarming until it finds itself in tragic mode.

Padraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson) are Mutt-and-Jeff best buds.  Technically they’re  farmers, but they don’t spend a lot of time working.  Most afternoons they can be found downing pints in the local pub.

Padraic — a childlike fellow followed everywhere by his miniature donkey — is mildly alarmed when one day Colm refuses to answer his door.  He’s in there, all right, smoking a cig in front of the fire. But he’s refusing to acknowledge his best friend.

Colm is immune to Padraic’s` increasingly desperate attempts to re-establish their normal routine.  Finally Colm reveals that he’s been depressed for ages, and fears that his attachment to Padraic is preventing him from achieving his life’s work — to write a tune for his fiddle that will outlive him.

It’s not that he hates Padraic…it’s just that the guy is insufferably dull, and that dullness is infectious.

A key to McDonagh’s screenplay is the way it contrasts the beauty of Inisherin Island against the smothering repetition of its social life. 

It’s not just Colm who’s going stir crazy here.  Padraic’s spinster sister  Siobhan (Kerry Condon) — also his cook and housekeeper — perplexes her proudly anti-intellectual neighbors with a passion for (gasp!) reading and dreams of moving to the mainland.

Never mind that the sounds of Ireland’s “troubles” — explosions and gunshots — are often can be heard from across the water.  Even civil war is better than wasting away in Inisherin.

And then there’s Dominic (Barry Keoghan), the oft-abused son of the local cop and regarded by most folks as an “idjit.” Well, Domiic certainly lacks even the most basic social skills; he might even be on the spectrum. But he’s far from stupid.  Listen to his vocabulary…he may just be the brightest bulb in this pack.

Kerry Condon

Despite the entreaties of his fellow islanders and the local priest to return to the status quo (the film contains possibly the funniest confessional scene in movies), Colm only digs in his heels. In fact, he threatens to cut off one of his fingers for every time Padraic approaches him.

Before it’s all over Padraic will come to dread the thud of severed digits being hurled at his door.

Yeah, dark.

It’s at this point that “The Banshees of Inisherin” (that’s also the title of the fiddle tune Colm is writing) dives so far into the black that a good chunk of the audience will be left stewing in puzzlement (if not outright disgust).

Clearly McDonogh’s sentiments align with Colm’s, whose farmhouse — packed with folk art objects —suggests a sensitive spirit trapped in a world of soul-killing banality that no amount of pretty scenery can relieve.

Farrell’s Paderaic, on the other hand, is an adolescent in a man’s body, friendly and open but apparently incapable of self-reflection. And like a child, he can take only so much hurt and rejection before lashing out,

“Banshees…” is ultimately a scathing takedown of the cliched quaintness of traditional Irish life, where creativity is smothered and self-mutilation becomes a substitute for  professional mental health care.

The big question is how many viewers will be able/willing to ride its glum message to the end.

| Robert W. Butler

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