Ending Friendship Can Be Messy

The first two feature film directing credits of Irish playwright-turned-Oscar-darling Martin McDonagh — that would be the bad-vibes Euro-buddy comedy In Bruges, and the psycho-killer crime farce Seven Psychopaths — are stories of men who, for one reason or another, end up at odds with each other. The men in these pictures are generally petty, insecure, emotionally brittle, and often ready to detonate at the slightest perceived grievance. It goes beyond mere distaste for the “other” in almost every case: McDonagh’s tormented male losers feel pitted against one another on a level that feels borderline-cosmic, their grudges as old as time itself.

Perhaps after trying and failing to get to the rotten core of America’s long, ignominious history with homegrown bigotry in the aggressively all-over-the-place heartland satire that was Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, McDonagh realized that it would be wise of him to scale back. Perhaps, of all things, it was high time for the verbose Irish malcontent to return to the place he’s always called home. Which isn’t to suggest that the deliciously mordant and surprisingly affecting The Banshees of Inisheren — McDonagh’s latest and most accomplished film to date — abandons the director’s preferred pet theme of masculine disenchantment, which has undeniably served as a cornerstone throughout his career. If anything, this exquisite new black comedy builds upon and refines that narrative obsession, sharpening it to a point of diamond-hard clarity.

Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson Make Magic Once Again

In Bruges, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, also the stars of McDonagh’s latest, amusingly captured the low-stakes malaise of two misanthropic assassins who had been dispatched to Bruges at the behest of their volcanic employer (Ralph Fiennes) on a murderous job that, all things considered, neither of them really wanted to be on. Seven Psychopaths felt giddy, even caffeinated in its study of fast-talking, pea-brained scam artists and bottom-feeding underworld scum attempting to outmaneuver each other. The Banshees of Inisheren is a riff on this same established set of themes, and yet the movie itself played in a gentle, even ruminative key that makes it unlike anything else in this filmmaker’s body of work.

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Part of that distinction comes from McDonagh’s very conscious decision to scale his narrative back. Stripped to its elemental essence, The Banshees of Inisheren tells a story of two blokes whose friendship reaches a place of irrevocable rupture. The time and place: a fictional Irish island called Inisheren, around the time of the Irish Civil War. Our two principle players are Farrell’s grinning, gratingly “nice” village dullard Pádraic Súilleabháin, and Gleeson’s sullen loner, Colm Doherty. The two men could not be more different in their respective dispositions. Pádraic seems almost willfully oblivious to how tedious his conversation can register to other people (it’s telling that he can talk for two hours about the bowel movements of his adorable miniature donkey, Jenny), while Colm, who argues that geniuses of bygone centuries, such as Mozart, weren’t exactly remembered for being “nice,” seems to have checked out of life altogether. All too aware of his looming mortality, Colm finds himself consumed with regret over the things he’ll never get to do; his meager attempt at cementing a legacy involves composing a fiddle tune that shares its name with the film he stars in.

McDonagh’s characters are usually operating from this place of personal disillusion, and yet the nose-thumbing, defiant irreverence that has characterized the man’s earlier, snarkier films is decidedly more subdued here. For once, McDonagh encourages us to actually have empathy for his desperately flawed characters, and without caveats. Every day, for years, Colm and Pádraic have met at the local pub for a pint. One day, Colm coldly rebuffs Pádraic’s offer, which stumps his longtime pal. “Sit somewhere else,” Colm grumbles at the man he used to call his friend. What’s all this about, then? Are the two having a “row,” as the denizens of Inisheren prefer to put it?

One Pesky Problem

Here, we arrive at another McDonagh theme: the ways in which a single pesky problem can start to infect the community in which said problem was initially identified (this theme is arguably at the core of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). Colm’s reasoning for his sudden distaste for his friend is, he insists, nothing personal. In his own words: he “just doesn’t like him anymore.” What begins, then, as a dispute rooted in simple human misunderstanding eventually begins to take on an unsettling life of its own, as Pádraic and Colm’s slowly ballooning rift seems increasingly liable to invite despair on those around them, an ensemble of bedraggled souls that includes a witch-like old crone named Mrs. McCormick (a scene-stealing Sheila Flitton), a violently abusive local police officer and his slow-witted pariah of a son (the latter of whom is played, in a performance of disarming tenderness, by the great Barry Keoghan), and the assorted livestock and animals of the island, who play a surprisingly critical role in our story as it unfolds.

The sly beauty of McDonagh’s masterwork comes from observing the quotidian difficulties that are involved in the messy act of ending a friendship. After all, life often provides us with examples for how to cut toxic or otherwise unwanted people out of our lives. There are ways, for instance, to break it off with work associates after you’ve left a job. Even the worst breakups, people eventually get over. But ending things with your best mate of many years? It’s a disorienting, often exceedingly ugly process in which people’s feelings get hurt, both parties generally say things they don’t mean just to hurt the other, and, if you’re unlucky, someone may start lopping their fingers off as a kind of macabre protest against the very prospect of spending another second with a person who bores them to tears. If McDonagh’s last film bit off more than it could chew in its attempt to take on a capital-T theme like racism in America, Banshees mines deeper truths from a story that, at the outset, seems almost stark in its comparative simplicity.

McDonagh’s past work has flirted with greatness, but has often found itself weighed down by a self-conscious, seething glib nihilism that renders whatever poignancy he’s able to mine null and void. Banshees is a welcome change of pace for the usually much more caustic writer/director: granted, he’s still as mean as he ever was, but for the first time, there is a sense of hard-worn, genuine compassion to act as a buffer against the cruelty. The Banshees of Inisheren sees McDonagh leaving the baggage of his previous work behind and ascending to a new kind of storytelling echelon: this is his most soulful, poignant, and cathartic work to date, a pointed study of the rot that arises from remaining stuck in the same horrible, stifling place your entire life — and with the people who, for better or worse, act as a kind of extended family. As one of the characters in the film might put it, it’s a bloody feckin‘ delight, and a critical pivot into more mature waters for its writer/director.