Reviewing Movies

From Socrates to the present men have found principles so important they felt them worth dying for but can anything be so important that it justifies leading the firing squad of one’s own brother? The struggle to gain independence in Ireland pitted the IRA against the occupying British forces but it also served to pit neighbour against neighbour and brother against brother. When the British finally left insurrection became civil war when fighting began over the terms of their leaving.

In Michael Collins we saw what happened nationally when his comrades in arms order his assassination and then all Ireland turns out for his funeral. In The Wind That Shakes the Barley a similar scenario is played out on a local level between members of the same family. As the movie begins Damien is about to go off to London to begin residency in a teaching hospital as a doctor but when a friend is shot simply because he refuses to speak his name in English and the train he is about to leave on gets commandeered he finds himself dragged into the conflict.

Damien is remarkable in that he has managed to rise from a hard-scrabble background of poverty and illiteracy to get an advanced education. The fact that he is a doctor is frequently reinforced as the movie progresses. He confronts brutality, starvation, and ignorance in the course of his travels. This movie is less about politics, strategy, and history than the personal cost they exacted on those who participated in the events of 1920 in West Cork, Ireland. The irony of a doctor being forced to take the life of a neighbour he has known all his life; drilling new recruits in the art of ambush rather than healing patients; teaching the art of warfare rather than giving medical lectures. Rather than give us a history lesson; this movie begins with a field hockey match and goes on to show how the same camaraderie continues on the field of battle and ultimately how disagreements on principles tear those bonds apart. While as an educated man Damien is willing to be pragmatic about the accord that was struck with the British; his brother Teddy is unwilling to compromise his principles and the die is cast.

In the end we are left with a feeling of sadness and the unanswered question as to whether any principle is worth the human cost exacted here. The title derives from IRA member’s habit of carrying barley in their jackets as a food source in a pinch which results; when cells are mass-murdered and buried in mass graves in the site sprouting barley from the store in the decease’s pockets. I’m not sure this was something I necessarily needed to know.

# posted by garthmailman@gmail.com @ 7:59 am