The Wind That Shakes the Barley

2006

Director Ken Loach

Mere minutes into The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a small village meeting somewhere in County Cork in disrupted by the ominous sound of tramping jackboots upon the ground. A heavily armed group of British Black and Tans disrupt this peaceful local gathering, violently accosting the men and screaming in their guttural Lancastrian tones that sporting games (in this case hurling) constitute a public meeting and are therefore forbidden. Within moments, for the terrible crime of refusing to say his name in English, a young Irishman is dragged off into a nearby chicken coup, beaten to death and strung up on a post as a message to any future dissenters. Shortly after this initial demonic display, a slightly smaller band of uniformed sadists make their presence felt on a train platform, where they beat and bloody a few more plucky Irishmen, all the while shouting and hooting in doggerel barks, as Cillian Murphy’s protagonist Damien O’Donovan looks on in horror.

There is simply no balance to The Wind That Shakes the Barley from director Ken Loach (Kes) and writer Paul Laverty (Sweet Sixteen). It is an account of the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) and the beginnings of the Irish Civil War (1922-23), as told through the eyes of brothers Damien and Teddy O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy and Pádraic Delaney respectively). It is not that Loach fails to create an impartial, nuanced, intelligent account of this conflict; he doesn’t even try.

Two binary opposites are created in the film’s lazily sketched characters. There is the peaceful, loveable Irish represented by Murphy and his criminally clichéd relationship with Orla Fitzgerald’s Sinéad. And there are the cackling, psychopathic, pompous British. By laying it on so thick, Loach’s romantic vision of Ireland detracts from the visual freshness of the film. Shot largely in the gorgeous green countryside of County Cork, which, situated in the South-West of Ireland is renowned for its rural beauty; from the rolling hills where Teddy and Damien train the would-be freedom fighters, to rustic country lanes that Sinéad cycles along like some mythical nymph. This is the kind of ridiculous stereotyping common to films depicting Nazis, where, until fairly recently with works such as Roman Polanski’s The Pianist or Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall, it was acceptable to allow audiences to believe that every single German soldier who ever donned the uniform under Hitler’s reign was a murdering, anti-Semitic devil. To venture even further into cinema’s lazy storytelling past, this is the kind of one-dimensional, caricatured nonsense that plagued representations of Native Americans and Mexicans in the Westerns of old. They were either savages - mythical ‘others’ to be feared for their differences - or fools inserted into the narrative to provide some much needed comic relief to ease the pain of another wooden performance from John Wayne.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley is truly unique, as we have now come full circle. Had it been made in the 1950s, not only would it have been from the British perspective, but they would have been the heroes, and the Irish would have been cast in the role of the dangerous, unknowable ‘Hun’, the uncivilised foreigner who must be tamed by ‘our lads’. Gone too, it must be noted, would have been the title: ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ being a classic Irish ballad written by Robert Dwyer Joyce and performed many times since, perhaps most notably by Dolores Keane. It would have been hard to explain the British as heroes with that mournful tune ringing in the ears of audiences. No, Loach’s film has come full circle. We have indeed resorted to the lazy, poorly written characterization of yesteryear; only this time it is not the Nazis, it is not the ‘Indians’, it is not the Mexicans, it is the British themselves who are stripped of all human flesh and transformed into rampaging, snorting, seething pigs right out of the flaming pits of Mordor.

Brits are well-used to their bastardization in Hollywood. Mel Gibson is largely to thank for that with his pantomime representations in both Braveheart and The Patriot. But the UK Film Council is not Hollywood, and Ken Loach is not Mel Gibson. A higher standard is expected.

One cannot ignore that Loach himself is not Irish. He is not even, like Gibson, someone from a completely different country altogether caught up in the lyrical mystique of the ‘evil English’. Loach was born in Nuneaton, went to Grammar school and attended Oxford University. It doesn’t get much more English than that. So what baggage was he bringing with him into a project such as The Wind That Shakes the Barley? Spike Lee once stated that he felt it was important for an African-American filmmaker to direct a Malcolm X biopic. The reason Lee thinks this is an obvious one, but is it always right? Does having a director from either side of the line result in an ultimately fair and satisfying final product? Loach brings with him the years upon years of English guilt, and Laverty a similar catalogue of Irish rage. The result is an uneven, unintelligent piece of work.

This guilt-ridden over-egging of the pudding is not without cause; the Black and Tans have since been dismissively labelled as ex-convicts and psychopaths, as various British governments have attempted to disguise its own part in the violent manipulation of the tens of thousands of ex-servicemen who enlisted in the UK’s Irish police force between 1920 and 1921. For many Britons, for many English, there is simply very little to brag about and plenty to be ashamed of. But the lack of subtlety to Loach’s film is simply unforgivable. He should know that people going to see a Ken Loach film are aware of the nightmarish Ireland of the early 1920s, and we would very much like to see a film depicting such a place. What we don’t want to see is an English director apologising for what his countrymen did almost one century ago. Time doesn’t heal all wounds. It probably doesn’t heal any wounds. But The Wind That Shakes the Barley is certainly no more successful at stopping the bleeding.

** ¾ / *****