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I'm ashamed to be English. That's your first thought while watching Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley. The problem is, it's your last thought, too. For two hours, you're battered about the head with his single-minded take on the events leading to 1921's Anglo-Irish treaty and the civil war that followed.
Men you have grown fond of have their fingernails torn out by men you have been taught to loathe. Then the men you have been taught to loathe do even more loathsome things to women you have grown fond of. You'd have to be inhuman not to feel your throat grow tight. But once the lights come back on, there is no denying that Loach has been playing a grown-up version of cowboys and injuns. He can imagine people only as goodies or baddies. His movie has all the moral subtlety of an earthquake.
Cillian Murphy plays Damian, an |
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Ken Loach’s new film has all the subtlety of an earthquake, says christopher bray
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up-and-coming medical student from the backwoods of County Cork, who is all set to continue his training in London. But as he waits for his train he chances to spy the Black and Tans going about their brutish British business, and vows instead to sign up with the IRA unit led by his brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney).
For an hour or so, as Teddy's less-than-crack forces are put through their paces in a landscape at once humbling and lyrical, things pan out in strident but stirring fashion. Alas, as history moves on and post-treaty factionalising sets in, the movie coagulates into a fratricidal melodrama that looks like a Hovis ad and sounds like a student union row about quorums. Nobody's asking for sustained action, Ken; it's just we can do without sustenance-free agit-prop. You've got a whole lot of wind, but nowhere near enough barley. 
FIRST
POSTED JUNE 22, 2006
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Last week: An Unfinished Life
