Written and directed by Martin McDonagh
Music by Carter Burwell
Cinematography – Ben Davis
In cinemas 26 December 2022 (again)
Currently available on Disney Plus
CAST
Colin Farrell – Pádraic Súillebháin
Brendan Gleeson – Colm Doherty
Kerry Condon – Siobhan Súillebháin, Pádraic’s sister
Barry Keoghan – Dominic Kearney
Gary Lydon – Paedar Kearney, policeman
Pat Shortt- Jonjo Devine
Sheila Flitton – Mrs McCormick
Martin McDonagh vies with Jez Butterworth for current best British playwright. He’s also directed the Academy Award winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and In Bruges, both as writer and director.
In Bruges starred Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as hit men and we rewatched it to get in the mood for this one. The actors are reunited here in different, almost reverse roles. We were desperate to see it in the cinema, but Covid intervened, then it was shuffled off to smaller screens. It launched on Disney Plus on 21 December and re-opens in cinemas on Boxing Day. We watched it on Disney Plus but may well take the opportunity to see the stunning scenery on a big screen. It’s festooned with five star reviews. All four principal actors are up for awards, as is McDonagh.
This film, The Banshees of Inisherin, takes him to the settings of his stage plays at last, and so is also set on the islands of Aran off the west coast of Ireland. It was the unpublished and unproduced third member of his Aran Islands stage trilogy. The trilogy moves back in time. The Lieutenant of Inishmore takes place in 1993 at the faltering start of the Northern Ireland peace process The Cripple of Inishmaan is set in 1934 in Inis Meáin. The Banshees of Inisherin is set in April 1923 at the tail end of the Irish Civil War (1922-1923), and Inisherin is a lightly fictionalized Inis Sheer. It was filmed partly on the real Inis Mor.
So, Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson) have been friends for years, perhaps all their lives. Pádraic lives in a croft shared with his sister, Siobhan (Kerry Condon), his beloved tiny donkey Jenny, two cows and a horse. Pádraic and Siobhan sleep in twin beds next to each other – there is only the one room. It’s an Ireland of horse and carts, and sailing boats to access the Mainland.
Colm is a fiddle player. He’s so good that fiddle players from the mainland have come to watch and learn his technique- in Ireland, Scotland and England there was an earnest academic race to gather in folk music before the original performers died out. He wants to be left alone to compose his tunes. He’s working on one called The Banshees of Inisherin. Colm looms as a giant of man, cast in granite. A mythological being.
Suddenly, Colm decides he wants nothing to do with Pádraic. He has decided that Pádraic’s a dull man, and sums it up, ‘I just don’t like you anymore.’ Pádraic is shocked and can’t let it go, trying desperately to renew their bonds.
Dominic (Barry Keoghan) is what they used to call a bit simple. He’s the abused son of the vicious local policeman, Paedar (Gary Lydon) and has an unrequited romantic thing for Siobhan. Barry Keoghan is going to sweep ‘Best supporting actor’ nominations for this one.
The argument escalates until Colm says he’ll cut off a finger with shears every time Pádraic tries to speak to him. He does so, and throws the first gory finger at the cottage door. Siobhan is disgusted, and what with Pádraic allowing the animals into the house, decides to leave for a job in a library on the Mainland.
I don’t want to go too far with plot spoilers here. You want it darker? It gets darker. You can read an outline on Wikipedia. I’d just watch it though.
The Civil War on the Mainland gets mentions … they can hear gunfire in the distance across the water. The metaphor is to put it in the words of Monty Python, bleedin’obvious. The Civil War was fought between people who had been comrades and close friends in the War of Independence from 1916 to 1921. They fell out, the Irish Free State supporters v the IRA… we’re at the start of the road to The Lieutenant of Inishmore which is set seventy years later with the traditional IRA versus the Provos in 1993. (A visual link is animals and windows!) Factionalism seems inherent in Ireland. Pádraic and Colm represent it, and they don’t even understand what it’s about. The obvious cinematic tip of the hat is to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) with Mrs McCormick hovering around predicting deaths, looking increasingly like the Grim Reaper.
Criticisms? Given it’s the title, I think they could have made more of the music – usually in vision, it’s Colm and two folklore fan fiddlers.
Hopefully, he could go on to do the Cripple of Inishmaan though The Lieutenant of Inishmore tips too far into the black side of black comedy for the screen.
MARTIN McDONAGH ON THIS BLOG
The Lieutenant of Inishmore, RSC 2001
The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Grandage Company 2018
The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh, Grandage Season, West End 2013
Hangmen, by Martin McDonagh, Royal Court, London 2015
The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh, Arena Theatre, 2018
The Beauty Queen of Leenane, by Martin McDonagh, Chichester Festival Theatre, 2021
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (FILM)
A Very, Very Dark Matter, Bridge Theatre 2018
The Pillowman, West End, with Lilly Allen, 2023
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I wondered why, if the film was set in 1923, the characters were speaking 2022 Irish English, with a liberal use of “feck” and “feckin”, words I never heard in my visits to the west of Ireland going back to the early 1950s. (Come to that, I recall a friend being mortified when he carelessly et slip an “f___” in mixed company in 1960s Swinging London.) If anyone had ever uttered such a profanity, it certainly would have been on the agenda in Confession.
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McDonagh has been criticized in the past for mixing” Irish” learned from J.M. Synge plays and modern Irish English, and is London-Irish himself. I am told that J.M. Synge used transliterations of Gaelic into English, with the result ‘feeling Gaelic’ but which is not ‘Irish English’ at all. There is an argument, I think a specious one, that ‘feck’ is not the same as the f-word but has different origins!
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A film is art and what counts is the mood and feeling that it translates. The artefact has to be consistent but not a copy of reality. The film creates its own reality.
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I agree. The criticism was directed at the stage plays, and was from people from the west of Ireland. It’s generally true of accents. You can take one a long way from your own as ‘near enough’ but when someone tries to do the accent of your exact area, you get irritated. So McDonagh’s Irish works for me.
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It occurs in Portrait of the Artist with the meaning of “pilfer”.
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Didn’t know the Joyce reference, but I had been told that ‘fecking’ meant ‘thieving’ and a ‘fecker’ was thief. In recent years it has been used like Norman Mailer’s ‘fugging’ and in Feck you! it has to be a minced oath.
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Great film, so typically Irish, well performed and filmed.
Keep well
The Fab Four of Cley
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
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Does anybody else think the Ghoul was Colm at the end. According to Irish Mythology Ghouls foretell death and can shape shift into a person once they’ve eaten the flesh of that person. The Ghoul was both Jenny and Colm respectively.
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