We’re back in Ryan’s Daughter territory, fifty two years on from the release of that film romance, set in a coastal village in the aftermath of the Irish Revolution of 1916. This time we’re on an island, off the mainland, from where the battle sounds of a Civil War can vaguely and occasionally (only early in the film?) be heard as ‘noises off”.
The Hollywood Bog Standard Irish Approach is applied once more. Build beautiful sets, in stunning locations, then blow them up or burn them down. All in an area of great natural beauty, which like the “noises off”, serves merely as backdrop, not to a romance in the case of The Banshees of Inisherin, but to a glum and meagre tale of depression and madness.
The Banshees of Inisherin is a stage-play with island characters and glorious scenery as a moving backdrop. Lest any one be in any doubt that we’re in Ireland, the name Inisherin is an Anglicisation of words in Irish for Island Ireland.
Colin Farrell, splendid as the sorrowful and immature Pádraic Súilleabháin, should get an Oscar nomination. Brendan Gleeson, as the depressed and mad Colm Doherty, may also be Oscar-nominated. With all-embracing post-modern disregard, Súilleabháin’s name would place him on an island off the south coast, say Cape Clear, while Doherty’s name would place him off the north coast, say in Lough Foyle in Inishowen.
The film is enjoying wide-spread critical and commercial acclaim. It is billed as a noir/dark comedy. There’s likely a Phd to be had by a student of dramatic arts to unearth the embedded racism in the use of those terms for comedies (alleged) of violence, gore and bleakness.
The Banshees of Inisherin is as Oirish as a frothy pint of stout stuffed with colcannon, black pudding, bacon and cabbage and topped off with a sprig of shamrock. Begorrah.
The plot is lame and the story as thin as last year’s nettle soup and just as bitter. Two men, one entering, the other leaving, middle age, bond by the daily ritual of sharing two o’clock pints in the island pub, staffed winningly by D’Unbelievables, Pat Shortt and John Kenny, who enhance the pub scenes with the best of Paddywhackery.
Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell), leading the bromance, invariably calls for Doherty (Brendan Gleeson), only to find himself suddenly re-buffed by his glum friend, for no other reason than that Doherty is bored. This very much contemporary “first world problem” is set against an old-timey backdrop of a peasant existence, straight out of Lorca crossed with John Millington Synge. It edges the film forward. Just about.
The island is peopled with locals who mill about from farm to pub, to church to graveyard to quayside, women in shawls and men in caubeens to bate the band. A clutch of student musicians, led by the excellent Aaron Monaghan, drives a fine trad session in the pub, spell-bound by Doherty’s indigenous fiddle-playing style. He struggles to write one last tune. He’s an artist aching to create a work that will validate his gift; that will be his tipping point and send-off as he dementias his way to senility. So transfixed is he by this desire and his need to clear his life of his boring and persistent friend to make time for his real work – he is the frustrated artist, with time running out – that he chops off not one finger but a whole fist of them in a bile of spite.
Why didn’t he save his hand for fiddle-playing and cut off his toes instead? No matter. No one seems to care one bit anyway. Island life, with all its bucolic coming-and-going, carries on. Certainly, Doherty is mad, but so, it seems, are his neighbours, blithely ignoring Doherty’s self-harm.
Madness and self-hate fill the core of the film. No one laughed in the cinema where I saw it. Whatever about glowing critical reviews, the best that can be said, perhaps, is that audience views are mixed.
“Ironic” is invoked as the style of the film. Irony implies something to be in opposition to, something to send up. Can madness, violence and paedophilia be sent up? The film has as much irony as a Pontifical High Mass held over the graves of victims of clerical sex abuse.
Writer and director Martin McDonagh has great success with stage plays and films, including notable West End hits and box office triumphs. He previously worked with Farrell and Gleeson as wise-cracking top-of-the-morning boyos on a killing spree in the Belgian tourist city of Bruges. The film also included the terrific English actor Ralph Fiennes, whose most regarded work was his use of the c-word in order to raise a puerile laugh.
The same pairs’ antics in The Banshees of Inisherin receive a 97% positive critics’ review on the amalgamation website Rotten Tomatoes, where it is described as a “feel bad treat”. Many writers have poured praise on the film. The Guardian (London) calls it “a flawless tragicomedy”. The New York Times suggests that “you are apt to be tickled, sometimes to gales of laughter, by the spray of verbal wit that characterises the McDonagh dialect.”
Ne’er a tickle did I experience and I’m fond of getting and giving ‘em. Begorrah.
Súilleabháin (Farrell) leads a “pigs-in-the-parlour” existence, without the pig. He shares the house with his sister, a dog, a pony and a wee donkey, who dies when he ingests Doherty’s severed fingers. Poisoned? Choked? This triggers the violent ending that long foretold itself, as did the suicide of the young man, preyed upon by his abusive father, the island’s Guard. Where’s it to happen then? Sea cliff? Lake?
McDonagh is hailed as a genius. There is no doubting his ability for story-telling on stage and screen, though, by any measure, this is a weak outing. He has talent, imagination and a powerful position in the international film industry. Searchlight Pictures don’t throw their considerable financial power behind any old notion.
I wonder at McDonagh’s use of his gifts, then reflect that how the gifts of an artist are used is, in large part, determined by the zeitgeist and the market that conjures it. In McDonagh, this leads to the grimmest portrayals and caricatures of lives in Ireland.
His work is compared positively with the work of John Millington Synge, an early 20th century Irish dramatist, who also used hyperbole, the gothic and violence, particularly in his most famous drama The Playboy of the Western World. In Synge’s case the audience of his time was national. In McDonagh’s it’s global, in the western-world use of that term. Considerations of scale (film is bigger) and range (film travels further) apply. The same tropes of hyperbole, madness, violence, sexual repression and isolation are brought before us without Synge’s charmed Hiberno-English.
Isn't there the light of seven heavens in your heart alone, the way you'll be an angel's lamp to me from this out, and I abroad in the darkness, spearing salmons in the Owen, or the Carrowmore?
A nagging concern about representations of people in Ireland, past and present, rose up as I watched the film’s opening. Hollywood’s interests have not moved on much from Ryan’s Daughter. Ireland is a place to set up a transient carnival, apply the brilliance of writers, directors, actors and film-technicians to tales of desperation, then decamp, leaving detritus behind.
The film was shot on location on the island of Achill, off the western seaboard. Did it leave an economic legacy to the people of Achill? Will tourists flock, even temporarily, to stand where Súilleabáin and Doherty stood on the glorious beach at Keem? Will they visit Súilleabháin’s house, the boringly quiet man of the piece, pony-in-the-parlour and all?
A resident of Achill, Dea Birkett, writes in The Spectator, not noted as a contrary platform.
The island is no more than a beautiful backdrop for these thwarted lives. It’s a familiar fictional tale of rural Irish misery, shared by generations of Hollywood script-writers.
I only saw one Banshee. Did I miss the others? However Sheila Fitton as the death-foretelling crone, Mrs. McCormick, makes a mark, as does Bríd Ní Neachtain, as the nosey grocer/post-mistress, Mrs. O Riordan. Like the island itself, these characters are “colour” and background. The strongest female character is Pádraic’s sister, Siobhán Súileabháin, played terrifically by Kerry Condon. Even this role is straight out of central casting for the Hollywood Bog Standard Irish Approach. Siobhán is bookish and frustrated. She can’t wait to get off the island. There is nothing for her in her home place. It is no surprise that she leaves for a mainland job as a librarian just as the violent conclusion unfolds.
There is large measure of self-hate in McDonagh’s work. How much of that comes from McDonagh himself is material for psychologists to delve into. I reflect that his most successful film (?), Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, took him to the USA, where he told a sturdy story, based on a solid comedy-drama plot, which offered a degree of triumph for his broken and oddball characters. The step away from Ireland allowed McDonagh to breathe and, as you might say in Ireland, get out of his own way.
This film arrives in a period of successful indigenous film-making, including fine work in Irish such as Foscadh, Arracht, Róise agus Frank, Black 47 and, in particular, An Cailín Ciúin, presenting a range of stories and forms, including comedy.
Island Ireland is a place you leave, like a cinema you’d have been better off not entering at all. I should have gone to see Wakanda, where the black/noir makes some sense.
Great cast. Terrific performances. Shame about the film.
The Banshees of Inisherin. Not recommended.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-the-banshees-of-inisherin-gets-wrong-about-ireland-2
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/oct/23/the-banshees-of-inisherin-review-martin-mcdonagh-colin-farrell-brendan-gleeson
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/movies/the-banshees-of-inisherin-review.html
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