Quelling the Banshees

‘I f punching a policeman is a sin, then we may as well pack up and go home,” says Colm to a priest in a moment of exquisite frustration while in the confessional. Delivered brusquely by Brendan Gleeson, the line is exactly what’s so great about The Banshees of Inisherin, which just won the Golden Globe for best comedy of the year.

The line evokes the characteristic Irish flippancy about state authority and the recent past of the film’s setting — during Ireland’s civil war, which followed quickly on the Anglo–Irish War, in which attacks on policemen were routine. It’s clever, literate, and mordantly funny.

And yet, it points to what I hate about the film, which treats Irish history as nothing more than a deplorable farce.

The last time Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson starred together in a black comedy written and directed by Martin McDonagh, they produced one of my favorite films. In Bruges was the tale of two Irish hit men hiding out in a medieval town. And it was a tale full of wicked smiles, rude midgets, and one dead child. The laughter and mayhem served the story, which was an improbably deep meditation on personal culpability and redemption. At one point, Gleeson’s character refuses to carry out a hit on Farrell’s character, precisely because Farrell was suicidal. Haunted by the medieval Catholic relics and gear about the town, the one hit man could not send the other to the Particular Judgment knowing that his soul was in such a state. And in that moment, each man took his own tumbling steps toward salvation.

Now, the same creative trio was filming on the Aran Islands — against the forbidding waves of the Atlantic, the stony walls, and the fairy forts where I’ve tramped as a child and an adult. What could go wrong?

Well, on the surface, it’s one of the funniest films I’ve seen in ages. Colin Farrell, who has quietly rebuilt himself as a seriously talented actor in drama and comedy, is hilarious as the dim, dull, but sincere Pádraic Súilleabháin. And once again, he plays off brilliantly against the gruff and grounded Gleeson, as Colm Doherty. These two are augmented by brilliant performances by Kerry Condon as Pádraic’s sensible and caring sister, Síobhan, and by Barry Keoghan, as the village fool, Dominic. The cast is given a whip-smart script that makes fun use of current modern Dublin linguistic ticks “like” and “fecking” in the remotest culchie villages a century earlier.

The story begins as Colm abruptly decides to cancel his long friendship with Padraic. Colm’s reasoning is that he doesn’t want to waste any more time in dull conversation and wants to devote himself to the fiddle and composing folk music that will be remembered centuries hence. The friendship then almost instantly sours into a feud, with Padraic’s initial appeasement turning into rage, and Colm’s determination and secret despair curdling into epic self-destruction. In the subplots, Síobhan wants to leave the rocky west coast for a well-paying job in the towns on the mainland. And Dominic wants romance as a salve and a way out from his father’s sexually abusive behavior.

Spoiler alert. By the end of the film, Dominic has proposed to Síobhan and committed suicide. Síobhan has “emigrated” from Inisherin to the mainland and found success that she urges her brother to join her in. Colm has destroyed his own ability to play the fiddle in his vindictive campaign against his old friend, and Padraic has lost, well, everything except his decency toward animals.

PHOTOS: The Banshees of Inisherin

The story presents itself as a kind of ethnic comedy about Irish grudges. And it’s an old joke. Chesterton once observed that the Irish were “the men that God made mad, / For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.” The final lines of the film, which I won’t spoil, are the sublime reward for the viewer.

But as a larger comment on Irish history, the film is, well, hateful. Yes, from the perspective of the future, the issues at stake in the Irish Civil War seem obscure or like trivialities, because they were smoothed out by political fudges decades later. But the fact that we don’t take oaths or constitutional questions seriously doesn’t mean that those in the past should not have either. Asserting so is just snobbery.

But the way that McDonagh has structured this film makes it a comment about Ireland that goes beyond the Civil War and the early years of the Irish Free State. One wag on Twitter faulted the script for not having “anything to say about contemporary Ireland.”

Actually, the weakness of McDonagh’s script is that it is the voice of modern Ireland shouting its constantly reiterated prejudices about the Ireland that preceded it. For a decade, Ireland has been commemorating the centennials of the central events in its modern history, from labor strikes to the passage of Home Rule, the Easter Rebellion of 1916, the Anglo–Irish War, and now the Civil War. Almost all of it has been drained of any real reflection and sanitized for the present-day goodboy tax haven that is as obsessed with diversity and inclusion as the most lavish faculty lounge in America.

The Banshees perspective is that Irish history and politics is not much more than inexplicable violence, caused by the stupidity (Colm) and delusional grandiosity (Padraic) of its men. This violence and idealism is a pointless distraction from worthier causes, such as earning a better living and the liberation of women, represented in Síobhan. And it distracts from the injustice of child abuse and despair represented in Dominic. Banshees thus becomes the apotheosis of this decade of Irish historical commemoration, summing up its ultimate conclusory repudiation and nihilism: Irish poetry, art, folklore, playwriting, revolution, bloodshed, and independence, well . . . it was a good laugh. Nothing more. Time to get a job at an American tech firm.