|
 The
film I am about to discuss – “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” -will
never play at the multiplex, though it should. It is powerful, with
excellent performances, Biblical without being ponderous, and
accessible as few of director Ken Loach’s films are. In 2006, it won
the Palme d’Or at Cannes, usually a strong indicator of a film’s
merit.
Ken Loach produces films of social realism such as “Poor Cow,” and “Kes.”
They are strong and often troubling, difficult to understand and not
always accessible, because Loach does not compromise with language or
diction, and he tackles subjects that most viewers conveniently
ignore. His latest film is his most accessible. Importantly, it
arrives shortly before the recent settlement in Northern Ireland about
power sharing between the Catholics and Protestants.
 Ken Loach’s
new film about revolution in Ireland takes place between 1920 and 1922
and concentrates on those living in County Cork in Southwest Ireland
who wanted lives as real people and not, under British rule, as second
class citizens. The rebels in the film are men and women who are poor,
working on hardscrabble farms, and in small jobs in town. The British
occupiers are the infamous Black and Tans, a cruel, brutish
counter-revolutionary force. In the film, as in life, these armed and
uniformed men did damage to everyone – men and women -- and everything
– farms and town -- as institutional thugs who looked down on the
Irish they wanted to crush as sub-humans, thus, in their minds,
deserving of their merciless treatment.
The film for me is more than history. It is a strong telling of the
beginnings of rebellion almost one hundred years ago. Though a period
piece, it rings true for the period I knew best in Northern Ireland.
As a TV journalist and London bureau chief between 1969 and 1973, I
covered The Troubles with its wholesale riots when whole neighborhoods
were set on fire in the sectarian violence that swept Northern
Ireland. At first, I covered a story I did not understand. In time, I
came to know it intimately. I grew to know Ireland, north and south,
each country and its people. I saw anger, hatred and fear. I saw
terror and its results. I saw stubbornness, frustration, and
intractability on all sides.
 I also
spent time in the Irish Republic, searching for stories and interviews
about Northern Ireland. There we often interviewed IRA figures in
Dublin’s St. Stephen’s Green where these men, usually terrorists, felt
safe, figuring rightly the British would never dare try to capture
them without causing more trouble for themselves.
The film allows us to experience the rebellion of the Irish against
the British from the viewpoint of two brothers, through the
understated acting of Cillian Murphy as Damien and Padraic Delaney who
plays Teddy. At the beginning, one brother helps lead the rebellion,
while the other, a doctor is against violence. The doctor then becomes
an important part of the rebellion – a killer as well, and a leader
among the men -- only to see his and his brother’s life, in his eyes,
compromised when the first brother sides with the Anglo-Irish Treaty
of 1921 with Great Britain, a treaty many in Ireland cannot abide.
 We see the
brothers lives torn to shreds from the difference in their philosophy
and approach. The split between them grows, and comes to represent the
future warfare among the opposed groups, something no one who signed
onto the treaty foresaw happening. The result is terrifying and
moving, symbolic and symptomatic of the latest struggle in Northern
Ireland to be free of British rule, and ultimately their own
prejudices. Loach sharply defines the two sides. Originally, there
were the rebels who had a common enemy in Great Britain. Then after
the treaty, with the Irish trying to rule themselves, in the film’s
final section, Loach separates the brothers and their followers with
tragic results. The consequence is civil war and more chaos.
Though Ken Loach’s work is not subtle, he does not need a sledgehammer
to make his points. In the world of social realism, his aim is to show
the injustice of how people suffer under authoritarian rule – the
British -- and then, how when free, and ruling themselves, people
cannot pull together. Sometimes when freedom arrives those trying to
make it work, are not prepared to act with sense and compassion. That
is the subtext of the story of the two brothers. That is the ultimate
tragedy of the film.
........................................................................................................................
At NBC News for 35 years, Ron Steinman was bureau chief
in Saigon, Hong Kong and London, was a senior producer on Today and wrote
and produced for Sunday Today. At ABC News Productions, he produced
and wrote documentaries for A&E, TLC, Discovery, Lifetime and the
History Channel. He has a Peabody, a National Headliner award, a
National Press Club award, a International Documentary Festival Gold
Camera Award, two American Women in Radio & Television awards and
has been nominated for five Emmy's. He is a partner in
Douglas/Steinman Productions, whose latest documentary, "Luboml: My
Heart Remembers," aired on PBS' WLIW/21 and the History Channel in
Israel, April 29, 2003. He is the author of, "The Soldiers 'Story",
"Women in Vietnam," and most recently, "Inside Television's First
War: A Saigon Journal," University of Missouri Press, 2002. |
