Our spiritual sickness and social divides are turned into Irish fakelore.
You don’t have to like playwright Martin McDonagh’s film The Banshees of Inisherin to feel that it is illustrative of our cultural calamity.
Set in 1923 in a small town on the Aran coast, the film’s three story strands start with dim-witted Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell), an Inisherin idler who is stunned when his best mate, native musician Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson), suddenly and inexplicably breaks off their friendship. This personal disintegration is McDonagh’s way of mythologizing our blasted social relations — not just during the Irish Civil War (heard booming in the distance), but today as well.
Pundits and politicians don’t know what the word “existential” means, but McDonagh does. Pádraic’s in a real existential crisis because he defines himself by his relationship with Colm, without whom he is forlorn. And in his stupid way, he becomes vengeful.
Pádraic responds similarly to the collapse of two other relationships: with his sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon), a lonely unmarried reader/dreamer, and Dominic (Barry Keoghan), a local half-wit who is abused by his policeman father. This is a more exact Millennial microcosm than in McDonagh’s despicable Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. (McDonagh knew nothing about small-town America yet enough about political fashion to exploit the beginnings of our social divide.)
The Banshees of Inisherin’s woebegone plots were devised to conclude McDonagh’s theater trilogy that began with The Cripple of Inishmaan and continued with The Lieutenant of Inishmore. He isn’t a good-enough filmmaker to authenticate the hard-to-pronounce names as part of an inescapable heritage. (Think depressive updates of Sean O’Casey.) Nor can he sustain emotional rapport among the characters (what Neil Jordan does so wonderfully in his Irish myth-movies), who remain stagey stick figures. Cinematographer Ben Davis makes panoramic vistas of Inisherin’s white-sand beach recall David Lean’s evocation of the Irish coast in Ryan’s Daughter. Sill, the movie feels overly contrived. Colm explains the film’s title as nothing more than a songwriter’s sibilant convenience. What he can’t explain is the compulsive self-loathing that McDonagh fails to excavate from Irish legend, perhaps because it’s sourced in the same social decay he exploited in Three Billboards.
Unlike the sympathetic view of ethnic conflict in Ryan’s Daughter, McDonagh’s tale gives us benighted, decadent, miscreant behavior, taunting shame-faced tribalism. He evokes Celtic heritage differently from artists who scrutinized and embraced Irishness such as Van Morrison, in the albums Astral Weeks and Veedon Fleece, John Boorman, in the movies The General, Hope and Glory, and Queen and Country, and Neil Jordan, in the movies Angel, Breakfast on Pluto, The Butcher Boy, High Spirits, Ondine, and Byzantium — and even Kate Bush, pop music’s greatest banshee.
McDonagh exploits the chagrin that plagues ethnic insecurity. Banshees resembles the purgatorial tribalism and ethnic discontent that Spike Lee gets away with. Pádraic’s moral devastation, fear, and despair indicate contemporary (Covid lockdown) sickness. His mysterious estrangement from Colm — and sudden abandonment by Siobhán and Dominic — touch on the inexplicable social alienation now besetting family and friends under the guise of political disagreement. Banshees makes it seem modish (as in Pádraic’s generational skepticism about the town’s haggard old soothsayer), but this is just McDonagh’s latest go at hip nihilism, as in his Tarantino knock-off In Bruges.
But McDonagh’s no Tarantino, and he’s no Sartre or Camus, either. Colm’s secretive disquiet and his ritual self-mutilation (straight out of Reservoir Dogs) are grotesque examples of human betrayal. It leaves Pádraic puzzled and pathetic. (Colin Farrell unaccountably channels Anthony Perkins’s Norman Bates.)
All that explains the film’s high profile and acclaim during awards season is that McDonagh mirrors vaguely recognizable “global reset” dread and social antagonism. I concur with the critic who saw through McDonagh’s sarcastic friendlessness as brutalizing. The director doesn’t do much to relieve misery or our current existential crisis. That’s why The Banshees of Inisherin feels like both an X-ray of contemporary malaise and a betrayal of Irish romance.
