If the predictions of the movie-biz bible Variety are correct, when the nominations for this year’s Academy Awards are announced, in a bleary-eyed Los Angeles before dawn next Tuesday, The Banshees of Inisherin will either match or break the record, held since 1993 by In the Name of the Father, of seven Oscar nominations for an Irish film.
With 10 Bafta nominations already in the bag and an 83 out of 100 score on the review aggregator Metacritic, the black comedy has received enthusiastic responses from critics pretty much everywhere, including in this newspaper. “Tragedy and comedy are perfectly paired in this latest jet-black offering from Martin McDonagh,” Mark Kermode wrote in the Observer. “A masterpiece of men behaving very feckin’ badly,” David Fear pronounced, letting his inner stage Irishman hang out in Rolling Stone.
You may sense a “but” coming. Before we get to that, let’s acknowledge that McDonagh is a writer of great wit and skill, that he has elicited fine performances from one of the best Irish casts ever put together on screen, and that The Banshees of Inisherin is a handsome, at times bleakly funny absurdist drama. More than a quarter of a century after his first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, premiered at Galway’s Town Hall Theatre, on February 1st, 1996, McDonagh has finally translated to the screen the signature twist on west-of-Ireland stories that brought him international acclaim as a playwright.
What is that twist? In the early days of his theatrical successes, the critical shorthand referenced both John Millington Synge and Quentin Tarantino. The first of these remains relevant, obviously. The second now seems a little quaint.
It’s more useful to see McDonagh as a quintessential cultural product of 1990s Ireland, working in the same postmodernist vein as the surrealist collage-maker Sean Hillen and the Butcher Boy author Pat McCabe, gleefully appropriating supposedly worn-out national stereotypes and mashing them up with contemporary pop culture to create something entirely new yet still recognisable and often very funny. It helped that he wasn’t born in Ireland; at a time when national identity was being reinvented as a more fluid, playful imaginary, he could step forward alongside Shane MacGowan and Michael Flatley in a new sort of postmodern green jersey.
The aesthetics of The Banshees of Inisherin are interesting. Despite the nods to John Ford (many shots are framed, in the style of The Searchers, by doors and windows) it’s a film that seems to be trying to look like a play. Key locations are repeatedly framed the same way, like stage sets. The weather is weirdly calm and dry for the Atlantic seaboard in April. Everyone is suspiciously clean. The actors are dressed in unpatched, unfrayed, expensive-looking knitwear.
In one of the most widely distributed publicity shots, Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell sit glumly with their beers at a trestle table outside the pub, looking like a couple of ageing hipsters on a Wild Atlantic Way pit stop. (Did customers really drink al fresco this way in 1923?) Authenticity is not the point, obviously, but this is deliberate, demonstrative inauthenticity. The same is true of the nods and winks to Oirishry, a reminder, not for the first time, that McDonagh’s imagined Ireland emerged at exactly the same time as Father Ted.
This interplay between nature and artifice, the archaic and the contemporary, banality and brutality, is integral to McDonagh’s worldview – or less charitably, his shtick. As Diarmaid Ferriter pointed out recently in The Irish Times, it makes him “the keeper of a long-burning flame of the dramatisation of marginalised communities in remote western locations and, like the efforts of his predecessors, his work has always raised uncomfortable questions about these depictions”.
But to what end? There are, it is true, moments of real tragic power (the final scene between Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan stands out), but, as a writer, his facility with words is too often matched by a tendency towards the facile. The film’s deployment of the Civil War as a distant echo or symbol writ large of the falling out between Gleeson and Farrell’s characters is the most egregious example, as if that conflict was caused by one side saying to the other, as Gleeson does to Farrell, “I just don’t like you no more.”
More importantly, the sound of distant gunfire from the mainland supposedly reflects back on to the fractured relationship between the two men but not, as some have argued, to illuminate its themes of isolation, claustrophobia and depression. Instead, the cartoonish self-mutilation that plays out in the later stages is a contrivance too far, less an act of existential despair by the character than a nihilist gag by his creator. Not for the first time with McDonagh’s work, there’s a hole where you might hope to find a heart.
