The Wind That Shakes The Barley

March 16 2007: The Final Year of Cinema Week 11

One of the best things that film can do is open one’s eyes and let the viewer in on a reality they never thought to think about, revealing one of those epistemological concepts so eloquently referred to by human monster Donald Rumsfeld as an “unknown unknown.” I had never thought to consider how deeply a woman’s day could be ruined by a wig mishap until I saw Tangerine (2015). I had never pondered the idea of power struggles across sister wives in a polygamous marriage until I saw Raise The Red Lantern (1991). I never realized that if I found myself in an erupting volcano disaster zone that I might need to worry about lake water turning corrosively acidic until I saw Dante’s Peak (1997). Just last week I wrote about how harmful a false narrative of the past can be, but the flip side of this is art that reveals a new truth about a true event, perhaps one that you had never considered considering until the art revealed a greater historical truth than a history book can. Such art grows our souls, and folks, The Wind That Shakes The Barley is just such a piece of art.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley is the story of two brothers in 1920s County Cork living through the conflicts leading up to the creation of an independent Irish republic. Teddy (Pádraic Delaney) leads a column of the Irish Republican Army fighting a guerilla war against the British Special Forces. His brother Damien (Cillian Murphy) has no interest in the conflict and is intending to leave to study medicine in London until the atrocities of the Black & Tans radicalize him into the struggle. As the war rages on, its brutal nature causes the both of them to perform morally questionable acts in the name of the greater good. As the conflict with the British winds down to a close Teddy and Damien realize that they had conflicting hopes for the future of Ireland, causing them to find themselves on opposite sides of the ensuing civil war between the Republicans and the Free Staters, eventually coming down to a heart wrenching conflict as brother literally fights against brother.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley is an Irish movie about Irish stuff and this immediately puts me at least a little in the bag for it from the beginning. While I love living in the country that brought the world Jazz and Country Music and Barbecue and General Tso’s Chicken, I simply do not understand my countrymen who don’t celebrate their ancestral heritage at every possible opportunity. While folks like my Italian-American friends can celebrate their heritage with foodways, and folks like my Asian-American friends can augment that with celebrations of holidays like Lunar New Year, Irish-Americans have no such resources. Roasted potatoes, while delicious, are difficult to romanticize, and St Patrick’s Day in America is honestly best not discussed, so I turn to art and literature for my connections to the auld country. Sometimes my natural prejudice in favor of Irish art can lead me to having questionable preferences due to some art getting Irish bonus points¹ I feel I can confidently say, though, that The Wind That Shakes The Barley is a profoundly compelling piece of art on every level. I would only recommend watching Michael Collins (1996) to someone with a particular interest in Irish history or Liam Neeson as an actor. I would recommend The Wind That Shakes The Barley to anyone with a functional soul.

To the extent that there is a commonly held understanding about the Irish Revolution it is this: The island of Ireland was conquered by England in a series of military expeditions between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Anti-Catholic legislation from England slowly eroded Irish political power until the island was being run as a de-facto colony of the English. The famine years of the 1840s and 50s came and Ireland’s population dropped by a full quarter either due to at best neglect and at worst active encouragement by Parliament, causing a galvanizing political movement to emerge by the Irish in favor of running their own affairs and being free of England’s meddling. In 1919 the first Dáil Éireann was convened in Dublin, declaring Ireland a free and independent republic. A protracted guerilla conflict followed until a treaty was signed in 1922 creating an Irish free state out of 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties. It was a conflict of religious and ethnic self-determination that the revolution broadly solved by its end (except for the sticky question of those six counties in the north, but that’s a different problem).

The film opens with exactly such an ethnic conflict. Damien, prior to shipping out to England for med school, is playing one last game of Hurling² with his mates in his rural village. Upon conclusion of the game a group of Black & Tans come storming in, informing them that under the Defense of the Realm act that all public meetings are banned, Hurling matches included. While collecting the names of the participants, Damien’s friend Micheail Ó Súileabháin answers the English soldiers’ questions in Irish, causing him to be dragged away and ultimately killed. The act of being too proudly Irish — between playing an Irish sport, speaking the Irish language, and ultimately just having too Irish a name (the soldiers start hassling him extra hard before he even begins speaking Irish when he pronounces his own name “mee-hoil” rather than “my-kuhl”) — is enough to get you killed. Thus turns the ever present wheel of imperialist violence: yesterday’s civilian becomes tomorrow’s insurgent after today’s atrocity. At this stage, Teddy and his mates in the village are ready to fight, but Damien remains unconvinced, fearing the crown’s superior firepower. “You’re going to take on the British Empire with your hurley, is that it?” he asks.

The point that The Wind That Shakes The Barley raises is that while this ethnic conflict was one of the problems the revolution aimed to solve, it wasn’t the entirety of them. It isn’t until Damien is at the train station when he understands that the struggle for Irish independence is not only a winnable one but might also be something that could bring about about a new social order as well as a new political one. The same Black and Tans who killed his friend are attempting to board his train to the coast when the conductor refuses to transport them due to a boycott of the British Army by the Irish Rail Workers Union. Damien feels the righteous anger of his fellows, but it’s only when he sees that there’s labor solidarity also fighting the crown that he sees a way out from under England’s thumb and a new world worth fighting for.

Every historical revolution is begun by a broad coalition of people who agree that the status quo is bad, but nine times out of ten there’s some group that gets left behind when the old regime is toppled and folks need to determine what it is that they hope to build in its place. For example here in America both Thomas Payne and Thomas Jefferson agreed that a new political order was needed in this land in 1776, but only one of them believed that chattel slavery should be abolished alongside the monarchy, and unfortunately he did not get his way. So too in Ireland were there many people who fought and died hoping that there would be massive levels of social and economic reform in addition to kicking the English out. Leftist figures like James Connoly and Frank Ryan fought alongside more mainstream nationalist leaders like Éamon De Valera and Michael Collins, and several cities in Munster declared themselves as independent Soviets over the course of the war, the most notable being the Limerick Soviet of 1919. It’s easy to forget that the Irish Revolution may have been remembered today as a socialist one had the political winds shifted a little differently.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley pulls no punches in demonstrating that Ireland’s deprivation stemmed just as much from wealth inequality as cultural oppression in the days of the revolution. At one point Damien’s medical training is called upon to identify the cause of a young boy’s sickness. He dutifully examines him and comes to the conclusion that he’s suffering from the most preventable illness of all: malnutrition. This boy’s problems won’t be solved by having a meaningful vote in the Dáil, his problems will only be solved by his family being able to afford food. At another point a revolutionary court is set up to solve a local dispute: a local woman is deep in debt to her local greengrocer due to him charging usurious interest rates to purchase food on credit. The court finds in the woman’s favor, but their decision is immediately undermined by Teddy, who insists he needs the grocer’s support as he provides the necessary money for his battalion to buy guns. The seeds are sown of how the Irish capital class uses its resources to make the revolutionaries sell out justice in exchange for political gain. Damien is furious at his brother over this exchange, foreshadowing the coming literal battle of brother against brother in the film’s final act. The real Irish socialist James Connoly has a notable quote: “If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin castle, unless you set about the organization of the socialist republic your efforts will be in vain. England will still rule you. She will rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs” echoed in the film by the newspaper printer Dan when he announces “If we ratify this treaty, all we’ll be changing is the accents of the powerful and the color of the flag.”

Ireland today is of course no socialist state. Some may point to the failures of leftist states of Eastern Europe and say “thank God she isn’t a socialist state, look what has been averted.” But Ireland is no paradise either. Economic insecurity has continued. Unemployment levels only dropped below 10% in the 1990s. The Republic of Ireland was the country hit hardest by the 2008 financial crash, and still faces an affordable housing crisis to this day. A long term libertarian notion of charging little to no corporate income tax to attract commerce has resulted in global corporate HQs moving to Ireland without the corporations themselves operating there³ causing the exact same kind of bleeding of wealth out of the country that the revolution hoped to solve. The population still has yet to recover to its pre-famine levels. And of course, the six counties of the North that were partitioned away from the Republic remains a sore spot among Unionists and Fenians alike. There’s no way of knowing what a socialist Ireland would have been, but the past 100 years of capitalism haven’t been a walk in the park. While the best time to institute socialism in Ireland may have been 100 years ago, maybe the second best time is now.

Rating: ★★★★★ If you’re reading this on its date of publication, St Patrick’s day is tomorrow. While I have nothing against drinking American domestic lager beers, drinking 8 of them dyed green while wearing a plastic green bowler isn’t the greatest way to celebrate the patron saint of Éire. May I recommend instead staying in, consuming one (1) Murphy’s Stout (or a Kaliber for my sober friends), and watching The Wind That Shakes The Barley instead.

Economics: While it had been out in the UK & Republic of Ireland since June of 2006, The Wind That Shakes The Barley was released in US theaters on March 16, 2007. It opened at #44 at the box office behind the IMAX science documentary Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon in its 78th week of release. It would go on to make $1.8 million domestic as part of a total $25.7 million worldwide against a €6.5 million ($8.3 million) budget

Other 2007 films visited this week:

I Think I Love My Wife: On the subject of film remakes, critic and podcaster Alonso Duralde is fond of saying “don’t remake the hits, remake the misses”, and this completely pointless remake of the French New Wave classic Love In The Afternoon (1972) proves the utility of this aphorism. Director / star Chris Rock is normally so effortlessly funny one wonders if this was made as some kind of dare to see if he and writer Louis CK could make a film where we’d be bored to tears by him. If so, mission accomplished guys. ★☆☆☆☆

The Namesake: In between his depiction of stoner Kumar Patel in search of White Castle sliders and his turn as Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison under Barack Obama, Kal Penn starred in this quiet coming-of-age drama about the first child of Indian immigrants to the United States. His parents, arty lovers of world literature name him “Gogol” after Russian author Nikolai Gogol, and he must navigate not only the two worlds of his Bengali parentage and American peers but also the internal expectations of being named after his father’s favorite writer. The plot meanders a bit and has no strong central thesis, but the characters are beautifully developed and my soul feels richer for having spent a couple of hours with them. Bonus points for a visibly 30 year old Kal Penn playing a surly teen. ★★★☆☆

Next week: Shooter

1. A friend recently upbraided me for ranking The Commitments above Terminator 2: Judgement Day among the films of 1991, to which I will readily admit that the combination of Dublin wit and mid century American soul music basically drops it dead center among my personal favorite things. If it also included opinions about flags and content about the French Revolution it’d likely be my favorite movie of all time for pure special interest reasons

2. Hurling is a sport native to Ireland that consists of two teams attempting to score goals on each other by hitting a ball across a field with sticks called hurleys. It’s great craic.

3. The US-founded manufacturing companies Medtronic, Ingersoll Rand, Eaton, and Allergan are the biggest examples of this phenomenon