The Banshees

Went to a movie theater today for the first time since early 2020 and saw The Banshees of Inisherin.  Very good and very dark, in some ways even darker than In Bruges.  The film looks lovely, shot on two islands off the west coast of Ireland, which is good because the story deals with some dark emotions, though often injected with humor.  Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell, Kerry Condon, and Barry Keoghan are splendid.

The movie is set in April 1923 and there are occasional references to the ongoing Irish Civil War, at least twice we can hear gunfire and explosions across the passage separating the island from the Irish mainland.  I realized that at least one of the themes of the movie was as commentary on that Civil War, which occurred between June 1922 and May 1923, and left bitter scars on Irish society that took decades to erase.

The Civil War occurred because of an oath.  From shortly after the end of WW1 until the summer of 1922, the Irish rebels had fought a non-conventional war in order to end several hundred years of English occupation.   Britain eventually agreed to negotiate and after months of talks in London an agreement was reached (Winston Churchill was one of the British negotiators).  While it was short of full independence for the entire island (leaving six northern counties in Britain) and created what was to be called a Irish Free State, within the British Empire and, most importantly, requiring an oath of allegiance to King George V, as the King in Ireland, not King of the United Kingdom.  It was this oath that led to a split within the Irish revolutionaries, the Free Staters supporting it, however reluctantly, and seeing the Free State as the first step towards inevitable independence, while the Irish Republican Army saw the oath as a repudiation of all its principles.

War broke out between the factions in late June.  It was brutal, devolving into murders and executions.  The Banshees starts with a seeming inconsequential conflict over not much of anything and escalates from there, despite the wishes of the principals, as they are carried along by sticking by their principles.  Prior to the Civil War, two rebels, Michael Collins and Harry Boland, were very close friends but Collins was Chairman of the Irish Provisional Government of the Free State and supported the oath, while Boland opposed the treaty with England.  On July 31, 1922 Boland was shot by Free State soldiers attempting to arrest him and died the next day.  Collins attended his funeral.  Three weeks later, Collins was dead, killed in an ambush.  All over an oath.  An oath that ended friendships, that led to friends killing friends, that led to decades of bitterness, and delayed economic development.  An oath that meant nothing in the longer-term.  Under the 1931 Statute of Westminster all British dominions, including the Irish Free State, became effectively independent and the oath of allegiance was dropped by the Free State shortly thereafter, without reaction from Britain.  In 1937 a new constitution was adopted, in which the Irish Free State disappeared to be replaced by the nation of Ireland, a constitutional Republic.  By its setting in the midst of the Civil War, I think writer and director Martin McDonagh, also considered Ireland's leading playwright, meant to make that statement. 

But there are other themes also running through the film, and the interview with Gleeson and Farrell below explores one of them, as does this movie review. Worth seeing.  Just be ready for it.

NOTE:  It turns out the downside of being back in a movie theater is having to watch so many awful trailers, all played at top volume, and varying in quality from boring, to "seen it before", to repellent.