Subscribe

New reviews, interviews, and features via RSS or Email.

Related Reviews

Cillian Murphy

• Breakfast on Pluto (2005)
• Red Eye (2005)
• Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003)
• 28 Days Later (2003)
• The Dark Knight (2008)
• Batman Begins (2005)
• The Edge of Love (2009)
• Inception (2010)
• Transcendence (2014)
• Aloft (2015)
• In the Heart of the Sea (2015)
• Anthropoid (2016)
• Dunkirk (2017)
• Oppenheimer (2023)

Liam Cunningham

• First Knight (1995)
• The Guard (2011)
• War Horse (2011)
• Doctor Who: The Complete Seventh Series (2012)

Ken Loach

• Kes (1970)

This Film On

• Internet Movie Database (IMDB)
• Rotten Tomatoes

The Wind That Shakes the Barley

(2007)

124 min. IFC First Take. Director: Ken Loach. Cast: Cillian Murphy, Liam Cunningham, Padraic Delaney, Gerard Kearney, Orla Fitzgerald.

Ken Loach's latest, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, won top honors at this year's Cannes film festival, and it's easy to see why. Loach's nineteenth feature may be his most accessible to date, but it's also uncompromising in its dramatic explication of the guerilla war surrounding the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921.

Cillian Murphy stars as Damien, a young Irish doctor who fights alongside his brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney) against the pitiless, English Black and Tan squads. Paul Laverty's sturdy screenplay—bolstered by Loach's allowance for improvisational looseness in interpreting each scene—gracefully condenses the complicated history of the Irish Troubles in ways both literal and allegorical. In most respects, Loach lends the material an earthy immediacy, but the story regularly breathes for metaphysical reflection.

Aside from the poetry of the title (taken from a ballad evoking the land as graveyard) and an impromptu jail-cell recitation of Blake's "The Garden of Love" (there too are "tomb-stones where flowers should be"), Loach's characters search achingly for just-so verbal salvation—if not for this world, then for the next. At execution time, the Catholic soldiers instruct the doomed, "Write your letters." Another Loach hallmark is spirited, spontaneous political debate, and all corners are heard from here, from the overt politician to the parish priest.

In fighting a war of independence, the insurgents struggle not to become, in the process, what they hate. For his part, Damien is tortured by the irony of his life path. "I studied anatomy for five years, then," he says, "and now I'm going to shoot this man in the head...I hope this island we're fighting for is worth it." When a truce temporarily arrests the skirmishes, arrests, and torture, the blessing of the cease-fire is short-lived. Ireland becomes a divided, conquered nation as the pro-Treatyites square off against the anti-Treatyites, who will brook no compromise.

With a brother entrenched on either side of the political divide, Barley both honors and transcends its ideological concerns by locating the tragic, personal, spiritual toll of the Troubles. Though the fraternal metaphor is simple and conventional, it also qualifies as fictive historical realism. Loach brings history to life with detailed production design, fine landscape photography, and elegantly unobtrusive direction, but it's the soul-rattling convictions so effectively embodied by Murphy and Delaney that will hit patriots where they live—and die.

Sponsored Links