McDonagh’s latest work, which has just landed on Disney+, is both a sharp and ironic analysis of humanity and interpersonal relationships and an accurate allegory of the civil war.
– “I wasn’t trying to be nice, I was trying to be accurate”. This sentence, uttered by Mrs. McCormick (Sheila Flitton) – hieratic prophetess of doom who wanders around the island in mourning clothes and smoking a long pipe – is the aphorism with which Martin McDonagh masterfully describes his own poetics, the engine property that gives life to his works. As in In Bruges e in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missourithe Irish director throws a plausible but unrealistic work in the face of the spectator, an extremely accurate but not at all nice of human relationships in all their incommunicable absurdity, in which despair and irony coexist and intersect so that tragedy and comedy can never really be distinguished from each other;
– “Good luck to you, whatever is your fighting about”, Pastor Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell), the film’s protagonist, says to himself as he watches the fighting across the stretch of sea that separates Inisherin from the mainland. The story in fact develops on an imaginary island – Inisherin, to be precise – off the coast of Galway. A more boring than peaceful place where people are so quiet and kind as to be empty, flat, nothing but nice fellas to waste time with in the pub. All around them, on a mainland that is a distant background from which only muffled echoes of explosions come, the Irish Civil War is being fought. The Banshees of Inisherinin fact, it is not only a very fine representation of the incommunicability between individuals, but also and above all an allegory of a fratricidal war and its absurd thirst for blood. The conflict, on the other hand, is nothing more than the maximum expression of the inability to dialogue and, just like the absurd quarrel between Pádraic and the violinist Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) around which the whole work revolves, arises from a futile motive and turns into a spiral of willful self-destruction;
– “What’s your tune called?” “The Banshees of Inisherin, I think.” “But, there are no banshees on Inisherin.” (“What’s your song called?” “Inisherin’s banshees, I think.” “But they’re not there banshees an Inisherin!”). If the first two considerations hadn’t convinced you of the extraordinary (in the literal sense of “out of the ordinary”) depth and density of this masterpiece – in my opinion McDonagh’s best film – know that there is much, much more and that nothing in this film is taken for granted, explicit or left to chance. Each character, each element present in the staging, from the landscape to the pets through to the clothes worn by the actors, is full of meaning and refers to the more general sense of the film. The attention to detail is obsessive and every single frame, every word spoken, opens up a sea of questions, doubts, questions to which only the viewer can find an answer. Why, really, does Colm no longer want to talk to Pádraic? Who is Mrs Cornick? Are there banshees in Inisherin or not? Pádraic is nice as he says he is or instead he is alone dull (tedious) as Colm accuses him of being? For all these reasons, The Banshees of Inisherin it is a film that not only deserves to be seen, but makes a second and maybe even a third viewing almost necessary. It’s a film that never stops asking questions, never stops provoking answers;
– “You used to be nice. Or did you never used to be? Oh God. Maybe you never used to be.” (“You were once nice. Or maybe you never were? My God, maybe you never were.”) After all this flattery, it’s fair to admit that, according to the subject, this film had all the makings of being boring, very boring, at least as boring as the inhabitants of the island. What more than anything else animates The Banshees and elevates it by making it big and not just “strange” are the gigantic performances of the actors. All pure Irish, an excellent and almost necessary choice given the linguistic realism, they seem born to play those characters. Colin Farrell confirms himself perfectly at ease in miserable and somewhat nerd characters, masterfully integrating into Pádraic Súilleabháin, an anti-hero slowly but steadily stripped of any residual charm, capable of arousing – in this order – empathy, pain, contempt. Brendan Gleeson plays Colm, a sort of antagonist that the New Yorker has splendidly defined as an “ox whose, thanks to Gleeson, we can perceive the ruminative desperation”. The film, however, is illuminated more than anything by the light emitted by Kerry Condon, known to audiences for her roles in the series Rome e Better Call Saul. Like Pádraic’s sister Siobhán, Condon adds a note of cheerful and life-giving rage to the film’s moods, making her character the real point of interest, a flash of color in the gray rancor that pervades much of the film, the hidden fulcrum around which revolves much of the deep meaning of the story;
– “Maybe he just doesn’t like you no more”, the rational Siobhán says to her brother, trying to understand why Colm suddenly doesn’t give him a look or a word. “Maybe he just didn’t like it” instead is the explanation I try to give myself – like almost every year – when I try to understand how it’s possible The Banshees of Inisherin hasn’t won even one statuette – at least one poor category, at least one! – out of nine nominations. Here certainly McDonagh’s film was not expected to do away with Oscars – it’s not that type of film – but it remains truly inconceivable how neither Farrell’s interpretation, nor Gleeson’s, nor Condon’s, nor the writing or direction by McDonagh were judged more deserving than their counterparts in Everything Everywhere All at Once. We will not tear our hair out (indeed, we will not mutilate the fingers of one hand) for the despair – the awards leave the time they find – but it’s a shame not to see the merit of a work of such quality and depth recognized.