Village Idiots
A new movie reveals the price of community life—and the costs of not paying it.
I had two initial reactions when I began watching the new independent film The Banshees of Inisherin at my local multiplex last weekend. My first was awe at the beauty of the seaside Irish landscape (the film, whose setting is fictive, was shot on the island of Inishmore off the Galway coast). The second was the severity of village life in such communities. The movie is set in the early 1920s—the Irish civil war is winding down; residents on the island can hear artillery fire in the distance—with a sense of literal as well as figurative remoteness that the Republic has long since left behind. Still, as a metaphor for small-town life generally, I think the film is illuminating for its likely viewers, who are likely to be people who have proudly pursued and achieved a measure of choice and mobility in their schooling, profession, and geographic location. In that sense, the movie holds up a mirror to modern life.
The Banshees of Inisherin was written and directed by Irishman Martin McDonagh, and features a stellar Irish cast that includes Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell—the two starred in McDonagh’s 2008 film In Bruges—and the consistently wonderful Kerry Condon (she of Rome and Breaking Bad fame). Gleeson plays Colm, a fiddler who at the outset of the story suddenly and inexplicably stops speaking with his former friend Pádraic, played by Farrell. Condon is Pádraic’s sister Siobhán, with whom he shares a house after the death of their parents.
The principal pleasure of this film is the acting. Gleeson is an old pro who conveys character in the smallest of gestures—his face has a fascinatingly Lincolnesque complexity—and Farrell is utterly captivating in the way he conveys and sustains Pádraic’s pain and bewilderment at his inexplicable rejection, which he refuses to accept. There’s a fable-like quality to the story, in that Colm’s growing frustration leads him to take truly perverse steps to convey his determination to rid himself of Pádraic’s company, with tragicomic consequences. The plot unfolds against a backdrop of village types who include a brutish policeman, a nosy shopkeeper, and an awkward suitor for Siobhán who’s even more dimwitted than Pádraic. There’s also a Macbeth-like witch figure who haunts and prophecies bad outcomes for the characters—a banshee. (The title of the film also refers to a piece of music.)
Not too far into the movie, we learn the reason for Colm’s stance toward Pádraic: he wants to focus his time and attention on the legacy he hopes to leave in the form of songwriting. We see him at work in composition, and recruiting young players with whom he performs (Gleeson is in fact an accomplished fiddler). The only character who can match him in intelligence and ambition is Siobhán, who is often exasperated with her brother but becomes even more exasperated with Colm’s treatment of him. When she demands an explanation, Colm replies by saying Pádraic is dull. “But he’s always been dull,” she retorts. “What’s changed?” His answer: “I’ve changed. I just don’t have a place for dullness in me life anymore.” To which she says, “But you live on an island off the coast of Ireland, Colm—what the hell are you hopin’ for, like?”
What the hell, indeed. Colm is not exactly a cruel man—at a couple of points in the story he steps in on behalf of his beleaguered former friend—but the impropriety of his behavior is rivaled only by Pádraic’s pathetic refusal to let the relationship go. Actually, Pádraic makes a pretty good drunken case for himself as a nice (in the Hemingwayesque, which is to say dismissive, sense of the term) fellow. When Colm responds by invoking the seventeenth-century legacy of Mozart, whom he hopes to emulate, Siobhán points out that Mozart was actually an eighteenth-century composer. He doesn’t seem to understand how perishable most art really is.
Still, it’s hard to blame him for trying to achieve a measure of such transcendence, especially given the despair he struggles to keep at bay, something we learn about in his exchanges with a parish priest. Inisherin is truly a desolate place—actually, one suspects McDonagh went a little overboard in making it so. Neither Colm nor Pádraic have spouses, nor does Siobhán—and it’s impossible not to root for her when an escape hatch suddenly presents itself. Most of us are dispositionally inclined toward Colm in our instinct to make our lives pay in some literal or figurative form, and at some primal level, it’s hard to believe that spending one’s existence in a community not of one’s own fashioning could offer the basis of a satisfying life. (Pádraic would probably drive us crazy, too.) But Colm’s vanity forces us to consider our own assumptions about the inherent superiority of the expressive individualism that is the hallmark of contemporary Western society, even as we’re confronted with the oppressive banality of provincial existence.
The Banshees of Inishmore is an interesting companion piece for another new movie, Todd Field’s Tár, which I wrote about last week. In that movie, we experience the thrill of mastery, even as we understand that it involves costs that are sometimes paid by others. While I’m not sure it’s the film’s primary point, Banshees does seem to offer a countervailing message: that finding peace with our place in life—in the broadest sense of that term—may finally form the basis of as much meaning as we’re likely to be granted. Because, John Donne notwithstanding, every man finally lives on an island.
I won’t give away the ending, which I don’t really regard as satisfying, and which is intentionally ambiguous. You may regard it as Colm incurring a burden for the choices he’s made, or see the film as a statement of the way temperament finally trumps circumstance. Whatever you conclude, The Banshees of Inishmore poses some useful questions about the way we live now.