The Banshees of Inisherin brings Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell together again some fourteen years after their first collaboration with Martin McDonagh in In Bruges. McDonagh’s work is marked by disaffected male figures, and Banshees continues in that frame. It is a patiently-told rendering of the dichotomy facing the dissatisfied: to linger in mediocrity, or to aspire.
Banshees’ opening draws the viewer into the bleak but beautiful landscape of the fictional island of Inisherin. From over the sea, the camera surveys a mosaic of fractured fields, split by drystone walls, criss-crossed with country lanes, watched over by a statue of Our Lady, before settling on Pádraic Súilleabháin (Farrell) as he walks home. The few encounters that he has on this first of many strolls across his island home belie the underlying loneliness of the setting, which sets the scene for the rest of the film.
Set in 1923, to the backdrop of Ireland’s civil war, the plot revolves around a dispute that emerges between Pádraic and his ageing friend Colm (Gleeson). After many years of friendship, the fiddle-playing Colm suddenly takes distance. When asked why, he replies simply, “I just don’t like him anymore.” Colm refuses to speak with his erstwhile friend, and vows to cut off one of his fingers each time Pádraic tries to bridge the gap between them, until he gets the message.
As the story runs on, Pádraic, by turns, asks his neighbours to intercede or he confronts Colm directly. He even recruits the local priest, who presses Colm on the matter in the confessional amid the typically witty repartee that characterises McDonagh’s scripts. Colm observes that distancing himself isn’t a sin. “No,” says the priest, “but it’s not very nice, is it?” This idea of “nice” echoes throughout the film. It is the essence of Farrell’s character: well-meaning but dim, or, in Colm’s words, “dull”.
When Pádraic hears of the last accusation and seeks validation from those around him at the pub, the reassuring responses from the publican and attendant barfly arrive too quickly. The rat-a-tat of the comforting replies repeating his own words back to him is at once comic and tragic. In their eagerness to appease their pal and see peace return to the island, his fellow drinkers betray the fact that they actually might agree with Colm.
As Pádraic struggles to come to terms with the loss of his one friend on the island, he is brought face to face with himself and forced to examine the limited significance of his own life. He lives on a smallholding with his much more intelligent sister, Siobhán (whose eyes and heart are set on the mainland) a few cows and his beloved pet donkey. Of mornings, he works his livestock; at 2 he goes to the pub. Without anyone to go with, his life is empty, and he is utterly alone.
As Pádraic’s disbelief turns to bitterness, his niceness turns to childish cruelty. He begins to manipulate and demean those around him in a bid to ease his own pain. Coming across one of Colm’s music students, he makes a brutal but hilarious bid to get the prodigy off the island and away from his former friend. Pádraic tells him that his father was just killed by a milk truck. This jokingly-delivered but lethal deceit develops into a vengeful savagery by the film’s end.
The self-reflection that punctuates Pádraic’s descent into unhindered rage is driven home by the mirror in his home, which becomes a recurring motif throughout the film in his efforts to redefine his sense of self. Meanwhile, the masks that adorn the walls of Colm’s simple home are a fitting counterpoint to it. They simultaneously point to his reluctance to give Pádraic a true explanation of his renunciation and the acute despair he feels as he contemplates his own death.
Where Pádraic has only begun to tread the path of self-discovery, Colm has been on it for some time. After years of whiling away his days in bland discussions at the pub with his nice but dim friend, Gleeson’s stone-faced character sees that he has only a handful of years left. And what has he to show for it? In search of a legacy, the accomplished fiddle player dedicates himself to writing tunes and teaching wide-eyed students from the mainland; it is a path incompatible with his banal friendship with the “limited” Pádraic.
The insular setting and McDonagh’s use of every aspect of the cinematic medium allow him to showcase this internecine strife in the small community of Inisherin. The phased repetition of motifs (speech, sight, sound and scene), punctuated by increasingly violent outbursts of gunshots and artillery from the civil war-stricken mainland across the water ensure a crystal-clear sense of narrative development, while cementing the significance of every scene.
Banshees isboth successor and antithesis to McDonagh’s cult classic hit In Bruges. In the earlier film the stern and imposing Catholic architecture of the world’s best-preserved medieval city, the artistic allusions to the final judgement and purgatory, and the outlook of In Bruges’s villain (Ralph Fiennes’s stunningly dark-comic London mob boss Harry) sees Gleeson and Farrell’s killers for hire cornered by a crushingly unforgiving vision of an absolute morality.
By contrast, the insular world of Inisherin’s agricultural landscape turns the brittle morality of the other film on its head, while maintaining the sense of claustrophobic restriction. The parochial concerns of a small community imprison the protagonists of Banshees with an unseeing decency every bit as cruel as In Bruges’s brittle code of ethics. Colm makes a sacrifice (of his friendship and his fingers) in pursuit of meaning and legacy, while Pádraic’s arc warns of the dangers of contentment in mediocrity.
No one can avoid a mirror forever.
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