The Wind That Shakes the Barley Starring Cillian Murphy and Padraic Delaney

Review by Cahir O’Doherty

KEN Loach’s new film, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, is arguably one of the most violent and shocking depictions of the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War ever filmed. It’s also one of the most truthful.

It recently won the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and has been an audience favorite at every major international festival. Now, finally, it opens this Friday in the U.S.

Loach’s film about the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War begins with a simple Sunday hurling match in Co. Cork in 1920. It’s a modest opening entirely in keeping with the brilliant story of how farmhands, clerks and shop assistants drove the most powerful empire the world has ever known out of their country.

For the ordinary Irish citizens of 1920, daily life has become almost impossible as the Black and Tans, a ruthless government militia paid to violently quell Ireland’s bid for independence, make their increasingly brutal rounds.

The opening scenes of the film are particularly harrowing. Young men innocently returning from a Sunday hurling match are targeted by the Black and Tans, and Loach leaves you in no doubt what will become of them.

They’re ordered against a wall and asked for their names. One of them, a naïve but defiant 16 year old boy, answers continuously in Irish, completely enraging the British.

They roughly hurl him into a nearby barn, beat him to death with bayonets and leave his bloodstained and unrecognizable corpse hung up on a rope to serve as an example. This happens in the first 10 minutes of the film, and the sheer viciousness of it leaves the audience reeling.

Witnessing this and further outrages, Damien the budding surgeon, played by Cillian Murphy, decides he has little choice but to abandon his plan for medical school in London and take up arms against the outrageous injustices he sees all around him in his native land.

It’s a decision that proves even more painful to him as he has sworn to protect life, not take it. But as always in a Loach film, irony abounds.

Loach looks far beyond the signature battles and events of the era to see how the tragic story unfolded in the eyes of ordinary working class Irish people who lived through it. Michael Collins is not a character in the drama; neither is de Valera or any other of the usual historical suspects.

There’s no sweepingly romantic film score or otherworldly light falling on the actors to tell us we’re witnessing the birth of a Republic. Loach avoids every trace of sentimentality, which is one of the reasons the film achieves its raw power.

The tragedy of the Irish Civil War is that, for short-term political gain, the British chose to partition the entire island, and then arm one side to kill the other. In the film Loach gives considerable screen time to both the pro-treaty and anti-treaty sides. Clearly he sees the merits of both arguments, but with the added benefit of hindsight.

Partition, a political firebomb to split the nation, also splits the IRA, and even divides families from each other, as the film painfully portrays.

For the family at the center of Loach’s film the choice is stark. Damien wants complete separation from the United Kingdom and a socialist revolution in Ireland, but his idealistic brother Teddy (played by impressive newcomer Padraic Delaney) is willing to accept the treaty as the best outcome for the time being.

The British have gone (except from Northern Ireland, of course) but they exit to a brutal civil war they orchestrate and encourage. The scenes between the two brothers as they are forced to choose between their vision for the future and the bonds that unite them are among the most emotionally searing you are ever likely to see.

Filmed in the often muted palates of the Irish landscape itself, there’s a stark realism to the work that highlights how well the director has captured his subject. IRA men aren’t filmed in windswept burrens, their hair trailing in the wind like latter day Cu Chulainn’s.

Instead they simply look damp, awkward and ill-prepared for the scarifying tasks they’ve been assigned to carry out. Stepping into bog holes and missing the targets they aim at, they’re a motley crew and all the more convincing for it.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley is Ken Loach’s most accessible film in years, and in every widening opinion, it is also his best.