The Wind That
Shakes the Barley: If you're familiar with the
career of Ken Loach, you know there's a decent chance seeing one
of his films will mean watching some kind of David vs. Goliath
battle between the meek and the powerful. With The Wind
That Shakes the Barley, the "haves" are the
British, and the "have nots" are the Irish in this
look into the creation of the Irish Republican Army in the early
1920s. If anything, Barley is a more solid offering
than Michael Collins, which dealt with similar subject
matter to much lesser effect. Barley is also a
fairly good primer for the utter confusion of the early days of
the IRA -- it sometimes pitted brother against brother, and
that's something Loach doesn't dare miss out on portraying in
less-than-subtle manner.
Our guide through this history lesson is Damien (Cillian
Murphy, Red
Eye), a young doctor on the eve of leaving his
country home for a job at a London hospital. But then the
British "black and tans" show up and make with the
hassling, the beating, the rounding up, the fingernail pulling,
and so on. Damien decides to pledge allegiance to the
fledgling IRA, and experiences a slightly more rural version of
the events depicted in Collins. A treaty is signed,
but at that point, you're only about 75-minutes into Barley,
so you know something isn't going to go well in the second half.
Barley, like all of Loach's films, is a decent movie,
and Murphy clocks in with another charismatic performance.
But for this picture to win the top prize at this year's Cannes
Film Festival (over, say, Babel)
is yet more proof that the jury's at France's top fest will
always jump at anything that hits you over the head with
anti-American or anti-British messages. Knowing that makes
things easier to swallow when Elephant
bests Distant,
or Fahrenheit 9/11 topples Oldboy
and The
Motorcycle Diaries. I liked the way Loach
let his camera run when his actors flubbed lines, but beyond
that, Barley is no Golden Palm winner.
