This review originally ran Sept. 5, 2022, for the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
We last saw Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson in a Martin McDonagh movie in 2008. It was 2008. “In Bruges”The two Irish actors were playing hitmen in a small Belgian village. The film, the first feature from playwright McDonagh, was bloody and messy and enormous fun; as much of McDonagh’s stage work had done, it gave bad taste a good name.
Now, after 14 years and three films, McDonagh has reunited Farrell with Gleeson. “The Banshees of Inisherin.” In many ways, it’s a change of pace for the writer-director whose other films were “Seven Psychopaths”And “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” – it’s an often elegiac meditation on mortality and loneliness that for long stretches consists of nothing but conversations between Farrell and Gleeson.
And even when things start to get dark and twisted and, yes, bloody – make no mistake, McDonagh has not lost his writerly bloodlust and perversity – “The Banshees of Inisherin”It’s still more about the conversation than the violence. It’s his quietest movie and, in many ways, his most touching, which is not to say that it won’t make you squirm in your seat as you wonder if it’s OK to laugh at what he’s throwing at you.
Inisherin, the titular island, is the setting for the film. It was set in 1923. Inisheer, the smallest Aran Islands on Galway Bay’s west coast of Ireland, is the stand-in. McDonagh started a trilogy of plays about those islands in 1998. “The Cripple of Inishmaan”Continue with the Tony-nominated “The Lieutenant of Inishmore”With a third play “The Banshees of Inisheer,” that he said wasn’t good enough to produce. (He did tell the New York Times in 2010 that he’d like to revisit it when he was older.)
The play was said to have been about “an aging writer with declining skills,” a description that does not fit any of the people in McDonagh’s new film. Farrell’s character, Pádraic, is not one for reading books, much less writing them; he lives in a small cottage with his sister, Siobhán (a spot-on Kerry Condon), who is an avid reader, but he’s content to hang out with his miniature donkey and spend every afternoon in the pub, talking about not much of anything with his pal Colm.
Gleeson’s Colm, though, is feeling his advancing years, and the spectre of mortality is making him dissatisfied. So one afternoon, he refuses to answer the door when Pádraic comes by for their daily trip to the bar. For two men who have seemingly been going to the pub in a small village on the tiny Irish island every afternoon for decades, this behavior is baffling to Siobhán and the bartender and everybody else who hears about it, all of whom have the same response: “Have you been rowin’? Sounds like you’ve been rowin’.”
But they haven’t been rowin’, and when Colm eventually shows up at the pub he explains things more succinctly: “Ya didn’t say anything to me, and ya didn’t do anything to me. I just don’t like ya no more.”
Colm, it seems, is bored by Pádraic, bored by all the aimless pub conversations, bored wasting his life on a small island close enough to the mainland that they can hear the gunshots and explosions and see the glow of fires from what everybody agrees is bound to be a civil war. “Good luck to ya, whatever yer fighting about,”Colm murmurs as he gazes at the distant red glow.
For Pádraic, the problem is, as he says repeatedly, that the conversations with Colm are a necessity: “I have nothing better to do with me feckin’ time.” But for Colm, the town fiddler, the aimless chatter – two hours about what Pádraic found in his donkey’s droppings that morning! – have become an intolerable waste of time. “I have this tremendous sense of time slipping away, Pádraic,”He said. “I need to spend it thinking and composing.”
Colm’s boredom with the routine is baffling to many of the villagers; “You live on an island off the coast of Ireland,” says an incredulous Siobhán. “What do ya expect?”
The film captures the idyllic island’s atmosphere of beauty and desolation, its hardscrabble existence and sense of community. Its cows wander between the green fields bordered with stone walls. Its spontaneous renditions fiddle reels or folk tunes are all part of the film’s depth. “I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day.” You anticipate some kind of explosion because this is Martin McDonagh, but before it arrives the low-key, gentle pace is richly satisfying, and the conversations between Pádraic and Colm (or the lack of conversations, when Colm gets his way) are a delight.
Farrell and Gleeson are born to the rhythms of McDonagh’s dialogue, which seems both precise and tossed off, and the casual connection between them is never less than sheer pleasure.
Eventually, Colm delivers a gruesome ultimatum of what he’ll do if Pádraic speaks to him again. Of course, Pádraic, who sees himself as one of life’s good guys, can’t keep his mouth shut. That means things can get very dark and very twisty, and what seems like a gentle, invigorating character study turns into a nightmare.
However, the special alchemy behind “The Banshees of Inisherin” is that it can venture into McDonagh’s usual terrain while also retaining its gentle feel; it’s a moving elegy for a way of life that isn’t fading away, it’s going up in flames.
McDonagh, Ben Davis, the cinematographer, and the film’s director are hesitant to make it look spectacularly beautiful. The shots of green fields and majestic skies over the water are there, but they’re an environment, not a picture postcard — and we never forget that these bonny vistas are home to some seriously deranged behavior.
McDonagh manages to be both mature as well as transgressive, thanks in large part to the incredible performances of Farrell & Gleeson. “The Banshees of Inisherin”It is both beautiful and disturbing at the same time. The darkest impulses and darkest humors are transformed into a moving and evocative portrait about a time, place, community, and two crazy men.
Searchlight will be released “The Banshees of Inisherin”On Oct. 21, theatrically