Film Reviews	Reluctantly in the Patriot's Game: The Wind That Shakes the Barley by George Sax

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Trailer for "The Wind That Shakes the Barley"

Though it’s been nearly a year since it won the Palme d’Or, the prestigious top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Ken Loach’s film about the Irish Republican Army’s war for independence from England in the early 1920s might seem to be arriving at an unpropitious moment in history. In Northern Ireland a power-sharing agreement has recently been reached by Ian Paisley’s die-hard Protestant party, loyal to English control, and Gerry Adams’ Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley seems sharply at odds with the grudgingly conciliatory sentiments in Belfast and the six Northern Ireland counties. To some, it may seem designed to evoke once more the deep-seated animosities the Belfast agreement is supposed to transcend. Indeed, some English reviewers have accused Loach of promoting the IRA and its nearly 90-year-long campaign against English and Protestant rule. Loach likely regards such ideas as beside the point. His severe and sometimes violent, but eventually moving film is the result of an effort to use art and history to illumine at least some of the origins of that very long war.

Loach and his screenwriter, Paul Laverty, a frequent collaborator, have framed The Wind That Shakes the Barley as a story of the reluctant resort to armed resistance by a mild, reflective young man. As the film starts, Damien (Cillian Murphy) has recently qualified as a physician and is about to leave County Cork for an internship in Dublin. Two brutal encounters with the Black and Tans, the specially constituted English force sent to quell the revolt that broke out in 1919, deflect him from medicine to armed rebellion.

Damien’s older brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney) is already part of the fight, and soon enough both of them are fighting side by side. Damien’s moral and political transformation is all too rapid. In one gravely affecting sequence, he’s compelled to administer summary revolutionary justice to a reactionary Anglo-Irish squire and, in a more terrible act, an adolescent boy who has informed, a boy he’s known since childhood.

This execution is pivotal in Damien’s revolutionary trajectory. “I hope this Ireland we’re fighting for is worth it,” he bitterly exclaims to his comrades. And when he tells his sweetheart how he had to inform the boy’s mother, you can sense his heart breaking, even as his resolution hardens.

That resolve impels him into opposition to the 1921 treaty, which partitioned and established the Irish Free State in the south, but kept it a dominion of the British Empire. This position puts him at odds with Teddy in the civil war which followed, with predictable and personally devastating consequences.

These personal tragedies are crucial to Loach’s narrative, but he seems to have had another, allied purpose. He and Laverty have provided a sort of dramatized political primer on the rebellion’s changing challenges and conflicts. When the mostly young rebels debate the appropriate response to the treaty, the scene is strikingly convincing even though Loach has eschewed conventional dramatic gestures. The opposing arguments of the young men and women are made forcefully, but with a sometimes halting syntax and delivery, almost as if the scene was improvised.

Loach frequently tamps down the dramatic and visual potency of what he’s depicting. The film’s light is natural and mostly flattening throughout. There is a kind of lyricism to some of the shots of the rebels moving across the rolling southern Irish greensward, but it’s unlike the lushness of travel poster imagery.

Loach relates terrible events in a deliberate and restrained fashion. The film has undeniably dramatic material, but he hasn’t crudely manipulated it to focus our responses.

Among the thematic elements at work is the almost inevitable disappointment of revolutionary ideals. Damien—who interrupts his desperate political and military struggles at one point to examine a peasant woman’s “half-starved” little boy—represents a humane socialist stream in the uprising. His brother becomes part of the practical, nationalist compromise with England and the northern Protestants. Damien has sacrificed so much of himself and others that he can’t be reconciled to a “freedom” under a continued regime of gross social and economic inequity.

Loach’s political sympathies aren’t difficult to locate, but he hasn’t skewed the film. His empathy is broadly conveyed (but doesn’t reach the English oppressors).

Murphy’s performance is in synch with the director’s unemphatic approach, but he still seems a curious choice for the role. His fine-drawn face and full mouth suggest a younger, more delicate Mick Jagger. He usually works close in, with only hints of intensity. (Even in Batman Begins his evil scientist was underplayed.) Delaney’s Teddy is the more obviously impassioned rebel. Murphy and Loach must have been trying for a feeling of subdued, conflicted nobility. The result is much more unconventional than it is a failure, but it takes a little getting used to.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley is meant not just to move us, but to move us to reflect.