S P L I N T E R E D | L I G H T

Last night I watched a film called The Wind That Shakes the Barley. It is the story of a group of IRA soldiers in Ireland’s revolution/civil war of the 1920s. The film was directed by Ken Loach and stars a cast of Irish actors and extras including Cillian Murphy, Pádraic Delaney, Liam Cunningham, and Orla Fitzgerald. Oh yeah, it also won the Palme D’Or at Cannes in 2006.

The film was great. The acting, costumes, script, casting, and cinematography were all excellent to my eye and ear. They created an Ireland that I found thoroughly convincing and genuine. But I don’t really feel that I have the vocabulary or erudition to discuss the technical aspects adequately or accurately–that is, in any meaningful way. But the movie was gut-wrenching and I had several strong realizations while watching it.

In the opening scene a rough but friendly game of field hockey transitions to an act of extreme injustice. The British are portrayed as savage thugs and the Irish as innocent victims. The scene got to me. I was appalled, enraged. But then I began to wonder about the filmmaker’s intentional placement of my emotions. I wondered about the historical accuracy of the event I was watching. I wondered what atrocities the Irish had committed to bring this down on themselves. I wondered if the events were really so one-sided. Surely all (even most!?) British soldiers were not like these thugs, and surely all Irish Republicans were not as innocent and helpless as these appeared. For example, the game of field hockey that opens the movie creates the impression that the Irish were peaceably minding their own business. I felt that I was maybe entering into another victim/victimizer film where your affections are decided for you and there is only one possible way to view the ultimate and inevitable martyrdom. (I must interject that those films can be good too!) But the next scene corrected my misunderstanding.

Here is what did it: An ancient Irish woman sitting in a rocking chair at a funeral singing a folk-dirge over a dead boy. This scene blasted me out of my misguided questions that ask about all British soldiers and all Irish Republicans. If you do a Google search you will find there are plenty of interviews and debates over the historicity of the film, and critics were quick to label it anti-British upon its release. But these debates and views miss the heart of fiction and of narrative arts. It doesn’t matter one iota whether most British soldiers and Irish Republicans were like the ones depicted in the opening scenes, because these were. A boy lies dead–murdered–and his people mourn him. To take a specific story of specific people and expand it to the level of news broadcast abstractions is an abuse of narrative. When IRA soldiers die in this film, they are not “four IRA militants killed in a confrontation,” they are “Jack, Milcheail, Benny, and Collin shot down in the heather.” This changes everything. And this in essence is the power of fiction. It takes us out of abstractions, out of the judgment seat, out of that place where deciding right and wrong is so easy, so objective, and puts us in that rocking chair with that ancient woman, feeling her bereavement. If then the issues become clean cut again, if we find ourselves thirsting for the blood of the British, sick with rage at the injustice, then we have connected with the suffering of these characters.

The second realization came near the end of the film. I read on an IMDB message board one viewer who called it a rip-off of Braveheart, and it was clear which film he thought was inferior. I seek to make no judgment between the two, only to say that a comparison beyond setting is completely dense. In Braveheart William Wallace is pure hero, and when he is executed in the end it is as a holy martyr. There is no sin to taint his victory. While the opening scenes of The Wind may have feinted toward an ending in the same vein the actual development of the film was the exact opposite. As a viewer, at the beginning of the film the objects of our sympathies are unified and clear. But as the story progresses the IRA retaliates, and then the British retaliate, then spies are executed, then traitors emerge on both sides, then Irish kill Irish, then women are targeted, then factions form. When every character is pushed to the breaking point, our sympathies, like Noah’s dove, have a hard time finding a place to perch. All that remains clear is the sincere disagreements of the characters. They all remain intensely real and tragic yet not a one of them innocent. This is the great power of the film–and let me tell you, it will rip you up.

There was a scene late in the film where I thought there was going to be an act of grace, a salvific martyrdom, or undeserved mercy to redeem the whole thing. If this movie had been a big budget 90s flick like Braveheart or a product of Hollywood’s golden era there would have been. Braveheart sees a problem and sees it very clearly. It is dramatic and moves us deeply. Good and evil are like night and day. The solution is clear–we can see it coming like the dawn. Like many people today, however, The Wind That Shakes The Barley sees the problem intensely, empathetically, and from all sides, but it knows of no solution. I see this as a growing trend in film–identifying the problem acutely, but casting doubt on the traditional solutions. Often times redemption comes small, as a tiny gesture, or half a smile. There may even be no redemption at all. Just a deep testament to our brokenness and need for something to break in from outside the story we are watching. No redemption–just the stage brilliantly set.