The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)
dir. Martin McDonagh
Rated: R
image: ©2022 Searchlight Pictures
Men would rather chop off their own fingers than go to therapy. If you’re even a little familiar with internet meme culture, you’ve likely seen one of the hundreds of “men would rather [insert stupid or awful thing here] than go to therapy” memes, which chides the male sex for our almost absolute refusal to solve problems by talking through them.
Instead, we usually opt for violence or other reckless behavior that often leaves us worse-off than when we started. The characters in playwright and director Martin McDonagh’s latest film, The Banshees of Inisherin (pronounced Innish-E-rin), would do well to have the little bit of snarky wisdom posted to their Facebook page by a friend. McDonagh set his film in 1923, though, so his characters needn’t be bothered with any modern critiques of toxic male behavior.
Set on a fictional island off the coast of Ireland named Inisherin, Banshees tells the story of a one-sided falling out between friends. Colm (ColmSonnyLarry to his friends) abruptly ceases talking to his lifelong friend Pádraic one day, seemingly, to Pádraic at least, for no reason at all. With zero explanation, Colm simply refuses to acknowledge Pádraic’s existence when the younger man stops by to collect Colm for their daily two P.M. ritual of walking down to JJ Devine's Pub for a pint (or three).
At first, Pádraic thinks his friend’s odd behavior is due to the date. He realizes the next day that Colm refused to talk to him on April 1, so it must have been an April Fools’ joke. Colm disabuses Pádraic of the notion. No, Colm has decided that he would rather spend his remaining years working on his music in an effort to leave some sort of legacy for himself after he’s gone. He no longer has time to listen to his dull friend prattle on for hours about what he found in his little donkey’s shite. What is Pádraic’s response to this harsh assessment of his conversational skills? “Well, it wasn’t me little donkey’s shite, it was me pony’s shite, which shows how much you were listening.”
After Pádraic refuses to leave well enough alone, Colm gives his former friend a warning. From here on out, each time Pádraic speaks to Colm, the latter will use a pair of sheep shears to cut off one of his own fingers. Pádraic is dumbfounded and disturbed by the threat. He keeps clear of his old drinking buddy, though, just in case.
Until he doesn’t.
The movie’s early-20th century setting doesn’t only serve to help McDonagh eschew 21st century discussions of toxic male behavior. April of 1923 was the tail end of the year-long Irish Civil War that followed the Irish War of Independence. Throughout the film, we get the not-so-subtle metaphor of brother fighting brother as characters hear munitions fire and see billowing smoke on the mainland from their safe island home.
Everyone – from Pádraic’s long-suffering sister, Siobhán, to the tiny village’s lone Catholic priest – tell Colm that what he’s doing to Pádraic isn’t nice. Colm seems to have as much contempt for the term as one of my high school English teachers. Nice, to her, was sickeningly anodyne. It was also void of meaning, because it could be applied to almost anything as an empty compliment.
Colm makes the point in one scene that no one in history is remembered for being nice. Mozart is not remembered for how he treated people; he is remembered for the genius of his music. Colm is closer to the end of his life than the beginning, and he wants to spend his remaining years creating art he can be remembered for, as opposed to wasting them with “aimless chatting” over countless pints of beer. He doesn’t care how cruel he has to be in pursuit of his goal.
This line of argument, running throughout The Banshees of Inisherin, struck me as McDonagh’s defense of his own provocateur approach to storytelling. His previous film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, was largely a critical success, but a few critics – myself included – vociferously condemned the picture’s cheap edgelord sensationalism and childish gleefulness in mocking political correctness. With Banshees, McDonagh seems to be saying, “I don’t care if people think I’m nice, I’m saying important things with my art, and that’s all that matters to me.”
There is, thankfully, little on display of McDonagh’s tendency to punch down for shock value in Banshees. The most egregious example is a brief gay panic moment in which the town priest questions Colm’s heterosexuality, all for the audience’s laughs.
McDonagh uses his theatre background to craft in Banshees an intimate play-like aesthetic. The three main locations for the movie – Colm’s house, Pádraic’s house, and JJ Devine's Pub – were preexisting sites on Achill Island and are memorable because they feel so lived in. As settings within the movie, they are so strongly realized that they become characters in their own right. McDonagh, his crew, and his cast all do an extraordinary job of giving their tiny provincial village an air of authenticity.
The dialog in Banshees crackles, despite the characters’ distinct unworldliness. McDonagh’s skill with reproducing Irish dialect for his characters’ patter made me feel at home, even when I didn’t understand every last word of what I was hearing. The back and forth as Pádraic and JJ’s bartender try to suss out why Colm is behaving so strangely encapsulates the day-to-day existence of these people perfectly:
“Are you rowin’?”
“No, we ain’t rowin’. Least, I don’t think we’re rowin’…”
Reuniting with McDonagh on Banshees are Brendan Gleeson as Colm and Colin Farrell as Pádraic. The three worked together on the director’s debut film, 2008’s In Bruges, a cult hit that I have yet to catch up with (I know, I know). Much of the pleasure of watching Banshees is in seeing these two make the most of the material McDonagh has handed them.
Gleeson evinces a quiet loneliness as Colm. There’s the faintest look of sorrow in Gleeson’s eyes as the local priest asks Colm, during confession, how his struggle with despair is going. His character is someone not to be trifled with, but Gleeson also offers a few fleeting moments of pure happiness in Colm’s eyes as he does the one thing in this world that brings him joy, making music. Gleeson is an accomplished fiddle and mandolin player, who, like Colm, has an interest in Irish folk music. Seeing Gleeson play the fiddle as Colm – no tricky editing needed – makes the character feel all the more real.
Colin Farrell plays the dimwitted but sweet-natured Pádraic with a sense of constant befuddlement. Farrell makes Pádraic’s unconditional love for his pet donkey Jenny – the sweet little donkey becomes a major fault line between the two men as the story reaches its climax – initially comical before it becomes heartbreaking.
Kerry Condon is a force of nature as Pádraic’s sister Siobhán. As good as she is, though, she’s not given much to do outside of becoming more and more incensed by the shocking behavior of both Colm and her brother as the two men’s relationship spirals out of control. Barry Keoghan gives a reliably off kilter performance as Dominic, a young local villager who endures an abusive (in more ways than one) father who happens to be the local policeman.
That policeman, Peadar, gives the film its true villain. Not only does Peadar beat his son, but he beats Pádraic for calling him out on the abuse. In the aftermath of that beating comes one of the sequences in The Banshees of Inisherin that gave me hope. As Pádraic lays on the ground, stunned by a punch to the face, Colm helps his former friend up and sees him home, even though he’s already told Pádraic he wants nothing to do with him.
The two men exchange no words, per Colm’s prior directive. But when he sees someone in distress, he helps. There’s a better word for that behavior than nice. The word is kind. Martin McDonagh is too cynical of a storyteller to leave it there. The uneasy détente between Colm and Pádraic in the final seconds of the film is a testament to that. It’s also a testament to the messiness of human relationships, which The Banshees of Inisherin explores with an unflinching gaze.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- Even if it didn’t have provocative ideas about human nature and the creation of art baked into it, the story of The Banshees of Inisherin is captivating enough. I had no idea where it was going or what would happen next.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- This movie might be the ultimate example of everyone-sees-themselves-as-the-hero-of-their-own-story syndrome. In one scene, Pádraic admonishes his sister for hiding behind a stone wall to avoid having to talk to the local old spinster (and part-time soothsayer). He can’t take the one extra step to understand why someone would effectively do the same thing to avoid him.
- Longtime Coen brothers collaborator Carter Burwell delivers a quiet, contemplative, and slightly idiosyncratic score for Banshees.
- McDonagh somewhat clumsily grafts the structure of a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy onto his movie. One of the final elements to achieve this, involving Keoghan’s Dominic, feels rushed and shoehorned into the movie.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Banshees was one of the films I was able to screen at this year’s Fantastic Fest. I wanted to spend more time on it than my festival coverage would allow, so I screened it again to refresh my memory for a proper review. This time out, it was a late Friday afternoon screening at Alamo Drafthouse Cedars. There were eight or so of us in the theater. Two rows behind me was an elderly couple. One half of that couple decided to spend approximately half of the movie filing her fingernails. It. Was. Hell.