Friendships can be as changeable, moody, and downright dramatic as great romances, though they tend to have a bland reputation on screen: with friends, to most screenwriters, merely convenient constants, there to support the leads in supposedly unsavory matters. of greater importance. If substantial studies of platonic relationships are rare, those involving men are even rarer. And if that comes down to a social convention rather than a cinematic one, that's part and parcel of the power and poignancy of Martin McDonagh's scathing "The Banshees of Inisherin," a film that follows the tortured breakup between two best friends in the remote rural Ireland with all the angst and gravity of the most charged romantic melodrama, its high and unleashed emotions all the more amazing in a world where men don't express their feelings.
Set in a severely patriarchal, conservative island community in 1923, a towering body of water far from the mainland, where the Irish Civil War rages on grimly, "The Banshees of Inisherin" sticks mostly to that world, populated as it is by moody, male taciturn, women encouraged to blend into the masonry and cattle barely less expressive than their human caretakers. Yet when his characters break, vent, and speak, they do so in the ornately verbal, gruffly poetic, and violently hilarious vernacular of McDonagh's best writing, reclaiming, after two American-set efforts, the Irish accent of both his inheritance as of his splendid work. 2008's debut "In Bruges," whose stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are once again a match made in heaven here. The result feels closer than any of his previous films to the intimate, biting lyricism of McDonagh's work as a playwright, and deeper and more sadly felt.
Director: Martin McDonagh
Writer: Martin McDonagh
Stars: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon
In "In Bruges," the tension between Farrell's youthful puppyish restlessness and Gleeson's more seasoned, world-weary calm fueled a buddy movie in which the partnership was hard-earned from a frigid start; “The Banshees of Inisherin” does the reverse move, showing a close friendship disintegrating back to a state of polar opposite disparity between the two leads. We never get a glimpse of gentle dairy farmer Pádraic (Farrell) and pensive older musician Colm (Gleeson) in happier times. Instead, McDonagh opens the day that Pádraic stops by Colm's whitewashed clifftop cottage for a shared walk to the village pub, as they have done every afternoon for eons, and discovers, to his bemusement , that his friend will not join him, he will not. I don't even come to the door, and I won't explain why.
For Pádraic, a simple but sensitive fellow, this slight reduces his social circle to a mere point, perhaps a short line if you include the kindly village idiot Dominic, which no one really does. Orphaned and unmarried, Pádraic shares his parents' dilapidated old house with his beloved donkey Jenny and his older sister Siobhan, a loving and studious woman who has never met her people on this desolate and cruel island. She is a protective Siobhan who manages to get Colm out of the reason for the abrupt termination of her friendship with Pádraic: she finds the young man boring, he has more or less run out of things to say to him and would prefer the company of his fiddle and his devoted border collie.
Predictably, reluctant to accept such an explanation without doing anything, Pádraic decides that he has been a victim of Colm's growing depression, and brilliantly decides to work his way back into the affections of his former friend. However, his charm offensive is halted when Colm issues a macabre ultimatum that elevates a simple estrangement to the level of an eccentric blood feud between two men. What begins as a sad, anecdotal narrative becomes more mythical in its fury and resonance: McDonagh has long obsessed over the more visceral and vengeful extremes of human behavior, but never has he formed anything so heartbroken by that fascination.
There is much talk here of "goodness", which has never been the default setting for this filmmaker: Pádraic takes pride in it, while Colm, who had a decade or so on the planet to tire of social niceties, has arrived to see it as an overvalued virtue. McDonagh's script sympathizes with both, while the audience may find itself curiously divided. There is a kind of admirable, self-aware integrity in Colm's simple and increasingly obsessive desire to be alone; Pádraic's terror of being left alone, especially as Siobhan looks longingly at a life beyond the island, is just as understandable.
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