Martin McDonagh (2022)
In 1923, on the small island of Inisherin off the west coast of Ireland, Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) lives with his sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon) in a basic cottage – flagstone floor, kitchen with nil mod cons, a few pieces of furniture. Siobhán keeps house, Pádraic a small collection of farm animals. There are three or four cattle, a pony and Jenny, a miniature donkey – who’s his favourite and, to Siobhán’s frustration, regularly joins them indoors. Pádraic is an uncomplicated man and a creature of habit. Every afternoon, on the stroke of two, he calls at the home of his friend, Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson). They walk down to the local pub, drink, walk home again. Until the day that Pádraic calls and Colm, though visibly inside, doesn’t answer. When Pádraic later tracks him down, outside the pub, Colm tells him their friendship is over, explaining that ‘I just don’t like you no more’.
This is the starting point of The Banshees of Inisherin, the writer-director Martin McDonagh’s first work for cinema since Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). That film’s uncertainly upbeat closing scene didn’t impress everyone (me included); in Banshees, McDonagh is evidently determined not to go soft. Pádraic can’t accept his banishment from Colm’s life. His immediate reaction to his pal’s crushing words is to reply, in a baffled, plaintive tone, ‘You do like me …’ In his desperate attempts to get Colm to change his mind, Pádraic seeks help from his sister and from a troubled young man called Dominic (Barry Keoghan) but to no avail. The exasperated Colm issues an ultimatum: each time Pádraic tries to mend the broken friendship, Colm will, with a pair of shears, cut off one of his own fingers. Pádraic keeps trying and McDonagh shows Colm to be as good as his word. In the confessional box, the pronouncements of the parish priest (David Pearse) are reliably nasty. Foul-mouthed Peadar Kearney (Gary Lydon), the local policeman and Dominic’s father, allegedly abuses his son and certainly assaults Pádraic, with a punch to the jaw that floors him and brings astonished tears to his eyes. Peadar is more than menacing but, unlike his law enforcement counterpart in Three Billboards, never threatens to reform. Mrs McCormick (Sheila Flitton), a pipe-smoking crone, prophesies that death will come to Inisherin and isn’t wide of the mark. Nor are the unkind judgments on fellow islanders that characters keep coming out with. When Siobhán negotiates on Pádraic’s behalf, Colm tells her that her brother is dull. Mrs McCormick, according to even the mild-mannered Pádraic, is a ‘feckin’ nutbag’.
Colm writes folk music and the film is named for one of his compositions. He performs with a small band of other musicians in the pub, playing guitar, until he’s too digitally challenged to do so. At an earlier stage, he expands, to Siobhán, on why he can no longer be bothered with Pádraic. With ‘this tremendous sense of time slipping away’, Colm wants to devote the rest of his life to his art; when Siobhán protests that Pádraic is nice as well as dull, Colm points out that no one remembers nice – that Mozart, long after the seventeenth century, is remembered not for his niceness but for his great music. Siobhán knows she’s not going to win the argument, though she does point out, as a parting shot, that Mozart lived and died in the eighteenth century. (She might also have told Colm it’s decades too soon for him to be using the phrase ‘tough love’.) Wikipedia terms The Banshees of Inisherin a ‘black tragicomedy’; plenty of reviewers, less surprisingly, are calling it a black comedy. Although the Wikipedia label seems a half-tautology (the ‘black tragi-‘ bit), it’s the more accurate description. If black comedy is a humorous treatment of a serious subject, this hardly qualifies. McDonagh’s witty dialogue, expertly delivered by his cast, sometimes makes you smile but he tells a grim story with a pretty straight face. That the tale’s macabre extremities may provoke shocked nervous laughter isn’t quite the point.
How much you like Banshees will depend plenty on your appetite for Martin McDonagh’s subversion of traditionally appealing Irish screen tropes – pub camaraderie and music-making, a small community’s local ‘characters’, etc. And how much you admire the film as original may depend on how well you know McDonagh’s previous work. I’ve still not caught up with either In Bruges (2008) or Seven Psychopaths (2012), his two cinema features before Three Billboards; of his stage plays, I’ve read Hangmen (first produced in 2015) but seen nothing. I was impressed by Banshees’ style and grave consistency though there were elements – bizarre exchanges in the confessional, the horrible death of a treasured animal, a climactic encounter on the beach – that struck me as echoes of his brother John Michael’s film Calvary (2014). (Siobhán putting Colm right about Mozart’s dates is cultural one-upmanship from an unexpected source – a detail of both Calvary and John Michael’s debut feature The Guard (2013).) On the other hand, those familiar with Martin’s stage work before seeing Calvary may have suspected the killing of the priest’s dog was inspired by the fate of a cat in The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001). Colm’s removal of his fingers in Banshees may remind the same people that the main character in that play tortures another man by pulling out his toenails.
Martin McDonagh’s latest story, though it majors in the off-the-wall consequences of the ruptured friendship, is occasionally nagged by realism. When Colm dismisses Pádraic as dull, Siobhán’s reply is, ‘But he’s always been dull. What’s changed?’ while the pub landlord (Pat Shortt) reasonably wonders that the two men were ever boon companions. (For a start, the age difference between the actors concerned is more than twenty years.) The isle of Inisherin is imaginary but the Irish Civil War happening on the mainland, and signalled in the film by repeated sounds of distant gunfire, is not. Verbal references to the warfare are thoroughly sarcastic. Peadar Kearney is temporarily required over the water when ‘The Free State lads are executing a couple of the IRA lads … or is it the other way round?’ During their seashore meeting that ends the film, Colm says of the conflict, ‘I think they’re coming to the end of it’ but Pádraic is ‘sure they’ll be at it again soon enough’.
It’s not clear if McDonagh intends Banshees as a bitter centenary commemoration of the 1922-23 Civil War and to suggest that Irishmen have indeed been ‘at it again’ during most of the intervening hundred years. But if he does, the animosity of Colm and Pádraic is too sudden and for the most part too one-sided – and its outcome is too distinctively bizarre – for this to work as a microcosm of persisting national enmities. Besides, it’s elsewhere implied that the Irish mainland offers the possibility of a saner, culturally less benighted life than is possible on Inisherin – hence Siobhán’s decision, midway through the film, to cross the water for a new home and a job in a library.
Colm’s and Pádraic’s closing conversation about the ending of – or pause to – Civil War hostilities occurs when the bad blood between them is cooling down, at least from the boiling point it has just reached. Colm severs the remaining fingers of his left hand and chucks them at the door of Pádraic’s cottage. Jenny, outside at the time, tries to eat one of the fingers and chokes to death. Heartbroken, Pádraic retaliates by setting fire to Colm’s house: he knows Colm is inside – as at the start, he can see him sitting there – but he does take Colm’s dog back to his own cottage for safety. Next morning, he walks the animal on the beach. They meet Colm, who apologises for the donkey’s death and says that, with his home destroyed, he and Pádraic are now quits. Pádraic disagrees, on the grounds that Colm survived the blaze. Colm thanks him anyway for saving the dog. Pádraic replies, ‘Any time’.
Next to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, this film’s drama is grimly impacted but the unsettled conclusion works better than that of its predecessor. First-rate acting doesn’t extend through as much of the cast as in Three Billboards because most of the smaller roles here are written one-dimensionally but that still leaves three fine performances. As Pádraic, Colin Farrell shows much more depth and authentic feeling than this viewer has seen from him before. Brendan Gleeson, less surprisingly, makes Colm a potent, troubling mixture of single-mindedness and despair. Kerry Condon is splendid as the forthright, exasperated Siobhán. Ben Davis’s cinematography and Carter Burwell’s unobtrusively bleak score ensure the film’s visuals and soundtrack are impressive, too. The landscape is wondrous but McDonagh takes care to avoid a facile nice-place-shame-about-the-people effect. An opening overhead shot of land divided by stone walls into rigid green boxes is typically expressive. Condemned by Colm as unmemorable, niceness is also hard to animate on screen without this coming across as soppy or condescending. It’s neither of those things in The Banshees of Inisherin when Siobhán sensitively rebuffs the clueless romantic overtures of ill-fated Dominic Kearney, or when Colm, despite wanting distance between them, helps the shaken Pádraic to his feet after Peadar Kearney has laid him out. There’s no doubting Martin McDonagh’s talent, and taste, for illustrating abominable human behaviour. These moments make strikingly clear he’s good at niceness, too.
25 October 2022
