The Wind That Shakes The Barley

The Wind that Shakes the Barley rattles the historical epic genre with its vicious realism and unflinching depictions of war. In a modern age where history often gets mashed up and regurgitated into stylized tone dupers like 300, it’s refreshing to see something cling so tightly to the power of truth and the cruelty of unglamorized violence. There’s an argument to be made for the expressive styles of some recent true life cinema, but there’s a much simpler one to be made for a film like this: it captures as true and lifelike a representation of an era as you could hope.

The material here is not digested into softer servings, but portrayed with all its horrors and complexities. Cillian Murphy delivers yet another outstanding performance as Damien O’Donovan, a level-headed pacifist at the height of the British/Irish conflict who wants to keep his family away from the aggressively rebellious behavior they’ve been directing toward the ruthless British occupiers. Their nationalism places their lives in immediate danger and has already led to the death of many friends and relatives as well. It’s Damien’s understanding that all of their efforts are futile and probably fatal, meaning the costs outweigh the outcomes. It’s only when he finds himself pushed by the British one time too many that he becomes willing to join his brother Teddy in the Irish Republican Army. His emersion into this world of rebel fighters and the emerging militant persona it cultivates serve as the crux of this film, which is rightly a genre textured tour de force that mixes war scenes with passionate family drama and eloquently scripted political debates. It can be playful, heartwarming, and lovely at times, but it also delves into the darkest treacheries of a nation at war. Director Ken Loach crafts a gripping and utterly vicious tale that doesn’t shy away from the outright torture involved. Numerous characters will be emotionally and physically devastated by the time the film is over. Many of them will be executed. Worst of all, some will even die at the hands of former colleagues as the film stretches into the time of civil unrest that pitted Irishman against fellow Irishman. Its dark subject matter will utterly dismay many viewers, but those unafraid of graphic, dramatically potent violence will be completely enraptured.

This is a complex, well-rounded film that explores the difficulties of war and stresses the intellectual certainties that can collapse a union upon itself. There aren’t good guys and bad guys. It’s simply two halves of the same nation fighting assuredly for what they each believe to be the greater good. This kind of moral struggle deflates the often pompous, obnoxious tendency of war films to become bloated glory pieces. This is an unpadded film that captures the nuances of human struggle amidst a national backdrop at a very difficult time in history. The weight of it all is not lost in the molding of a dramatic narrative or the staging of exciting battle scenes. Bloodshed and tragedy are at the forefront of this film. It both begins and ends in ugly death. The hope seems to be that watching people shatter the lives of their friends and colleagues will bruise the deeply held conviction in its audience that they’re opinions are always the right ones. It’s when communication and negotiation stop that brothers are literally forced to face one another at opposite ends of a firing squad. As darkly poetic as the downfall of Damien and his counterparts might seem, it’s also rendered in strikingly uncompromised detail. This is not a sugarcoated tale of lovely war, but rather a harshly crafted depiction of how good men fall and how even those with the best of intentions can get trapped in their own ideologies.

Grade: A