The Banshees of Inisherin is that best type of movie – the one you will want to discuss over an Irish coffee immediately after you see it. The film takes place in the 1920s on a quiet island off the Irish mainland and has a correspondingly small cast. Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and the older Colm (Brendan Gleeson) had been drinking buddies, spending every evening at the singular pub enjoying beer and whiskey and Colm playing the fiddle. But the film opens with Colm deciding that he doesn’t want to associate with Pádraic anymore. He wants to spend his limited time working on his music and engaged in more meaningful conversations. Pádraic, according to Colm, is just too boring, and nice. Pádraic has difficulty accepting this. Is it because he is too needy, or because the bonds of human friendship shouldn’t be so casually severed? In any case, things… escalate.
Writer/director Martin McDonagh’s previous films include In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, all mixtures of human drama and black comedy, and Banshees sits at a sweet spot relative to these others. It doesn’t have the manic energy of Seven Psychopaths, but it certainly operates in a heightened reality with surreal touches. It also doesn’t have the grander themes of Three Billboards (which put some people off, but, c’mon, it wasn’t Haggis’ Crash, and it came from a place of real humanity), but it still delves into human nature and the necessity for the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves to come true. It’s closest in tone to In Bruges, which makes sense as it focuses on the same two actors and their characters’ friendship.
I think the discussion that will come first after the film ends is an attempt to answer the question that has occupied thousands of hours of couples counseling and forms the fascination with reality TV: Who’s the asshole, here? Does Colm have the right to excise Pádraic from his life in the way he does it, especially in this small island community where you live and die surrounded by the same handful of people? Who bears the responsibility for each act that comes afterwards? But then the meatier questions are how and why. How can a person tell themselves they’re in the right while they’re doing so much wrong, and why do we blind ourselves to so much going on around us to satisfy our petty grievances. Despite the scope centering on these two characters, there’s a lot more going on on the island with others’ hopes and despair that may get bulldozed by their feud.
In fact, there’s a whole lot more going on off the island, too. The film is set during the Irish Civil War, and poignantly we hear the gunshots and explosions from the mainland during the film, but neither us nor the characters is sure who is killing whom. The events of the film echo the civil war (which I had to read up on as I was entirely unfamiliar with it), where former allies who had fought together for Irish independence now fought against each other to determine what form that independence from the United kingdom would take. But the film itself is not an absurdist allegory, like Aronofsky’s Mother!, where you can clearly assign a character to a historical role. It’s a depiction of how people who share so much with others can behave so selfishly, and still convince themselves their destruction is justified. It could as easily be applied to the politics of the US today.
Both Farrell and Gleeson are perfectly cast. Both are able to retain our sympathy even as they hurt each other and themselves, having a core of humanity revealing itself in different ways. The characters are remarkable for being able to shift between narcissism and the easy care and respect that comes from decades of friendship, just like people.
McDonagh is also a playwright, and one can see how this small story could easily have been staged as a play. But thankfully it wasn’t, because the film contains many. many gorgeous shots of the Irish countryside and the sea. According to Wikipedia, it was filmed on two Irish islands and it makes them look like an absolute paradise. I mean, apart from miniature donkeys coming into your house and shitting on your floor. But what a life of leading your cows among the stone-fenced sun-draped fields during the day and spending each evening listening to stories and music in a pub overlooking the sea! It’s too bad that the worst parts of human nature have to intrude. At least we have Martin McDonagh to tell us this warped story about human pride and we can try to make some sense of it afterwards.
Das Fressen 