The Banshees of Inishiren (4/5 Stars)

Inishiren is an island off the coast of Ireland. This movie, the latest by writer/director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Three Billboard’s Outside Ebbing Missouri) takes place on Inishiren in 1923. Apparently, at that time there was a civil war on the mainland. The characters can hear and see distant explosions off across the channel in the distance. But no one on the island seems to know what the fighting is about nor do they have an opinion as to how it should end. Its just this bad thing that exists in the world and nobody can do much of anything about it.

The location of Inisherin is as much a character in this story as any of the humans inhabiting it. It is exceedingly small, holds perhaps hundreds(?) of people, mostly farmers and herders, and everybody seems to know everybody else and their business. Indeed, they would have to because there is only one church, one post office, and one bar in the whole place. The bar is called the pub, short for public house. You don’t need a brand when you’re the only place in town.

This isolation and poverty makes what would be a trifling event into a very big deal. You see Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) does not want to be friends with Padraic Suilleabhain (Colin Farrell) anymore. He doesn’t want to drink pints with him. He doesn’t want to sit next to him. Indeed, he makes it clear that he never wants to speak with Padraic ever again. Padraic, much hurt, asks Colm why. After all, they were very good friends and Padraic does not recall ever saying or doing anything wrong. It is not anything you said or did to me, Colm explains, its just that life is short, he has things to do (or at least he feels that he should) and Padraic is dull. In other words, Colm feels that Padraic is wasting his time, time better spent working on composing music (he plays a mean fiddle) than listening to Padraic talk about his donkey. This would be a mean thing to say and do in any town, and in any other town it may just stop there. Maybe Colm and/or Padraic would just start hanging out in different pubs. But in Inisherin, there is only one pub, and its 1923, so there is absolutely nothing else to do in the evenings than drink in this one pub and stew about this cold breakdown in a long standing friendship.

Martin McDonagh is best known for employing cruel wit with low born characters, many of them criminals. As an example, in In Bruges, the first time Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell were teamed up in a McDonagh movie, Gleeson’s character was tasked with an honor killing of Colin Farrell but changes his mind at the last moment in order stop the Colin Farrell character from committing suicide. That’s the type of irony that appeals to Mr. McDonagh black sense of humor, and it works more often than not in his plays and movies (A Behanding in Spokane, yes, Seven Psychopaths, not as much.) Interestingly, Banshees is one of McDonagh’s least funny movies and that probably is a good move. Cruel humor would be out of place here given that all of the characters are basically good and some of them faultless. When bad things start to develop, it is appropriate that McDonagh does not try for the types of laughs he usually goes for. This keeps the story engaging as opposed to off-putting. There are only so many ways this can turn out given the constraints of the location and it remains fresh up to the end.

What drives the material home is the performances by Gleeson and Farrell. Gleeson has always been an interesting actor. He has the type of looks that generally would deprive an actor of a starring role in anything but interesting movies. Over time he has become one of those beloved actors that can just show up in a mainstream flick like an old friend and liven up the joint (have you seen Paddington 2?). It is Colin Farrell that is more of a revelation. Here is a man that has the looks of a leading man and if he wanted to, could remain a boring hot shot indefinitely. Instead, he has become a favorite of movie buff’s for his great acting against type. You wouldn't know to look at him but Colin Farrell is at his best playing losers (In Bruges, The Lobster, True Detective). I tell you, he is exceptionally good at it. His character is Banshees is a boring dolt. It’s another fantastic performance.

It can also be noted that the movie is particularly adept at capturing the language of 1920’s Ireland. I have no idea whether the dialect is accurate, but can attest that it is much different way of speaking than you may hear today. At the least, if you see this movie, you’ll finally have an idea of how to pronounce the name Siobhan.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (1/5 Stars)

Last year, I saw writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos’s film “The Lobster” and stated that it was one of the most original romantic comedies I had ever seen. It was the only film I had seen of Mr. Lanthimos, who at that point, had been making movies since the 1990s. After watching “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” I may never see another of his movies again.

The Lobster’s idiosyncrasies, it’s quirky characters, and its weird dialogue had the appearance of making sense because of the absurd fictional world that they inhabited. Having never seen a Lanthimos film, I suppose I just assumed that when he set stories in the real world, he would not expect to people to speak and act in the same unreal way. My assumption was wrong. “The Killing of Sacred Deer” has no place being set in the real world, but there it is. The unreality of what is happening on the screen and the unbelievable way the characters react to it makes it impossible for the viewer to empathize or care about what is occurring in the story. As a drama, it failed dramatically. As a comedy, the only laughs it garnered were the bad kind.

“The Killing of a Sacred Deer” takes its sweet time in getting to the main conceit of the story. As it meanders, you are left to wonder what might be happening. Several interesting story-lines seem possible, slowly the story is developed and you realize that the story-line that has indeed been chosen is one of the stupider ones. I will now give it away. A surgeon, played by Colin Farrell, once negligently caused the death of a man during a surgery. The son of that man, a shifty and sweaty Barry Keoghan, has put a hex on the surgeon’s family. Actually, to say it is a “hex” is doing more explaining than the movie cares to. What happens is that Colin’s family one-by-one slowly become paralyzed, stop eating, and start bleeding out the eyes. This happens to Colin’s son first before happening to his daughter. We do not know how Barry Keoghan is doing this or whether it a unique hex or has been attempted by anyone before. There is literally no attempt to explain it.

I guess that would not matter so much if other things were not missing. After all, many movies are based on otherwise impossible things happening. But the movie is so deadpan toward the situation, and its characters reactions are so absurdly understated, that it seems the movie is making a point of how pathetic  they are as they are confronted with otherworldly horror. Is the situation being played for laughs? People in the theater were indeed laughing when the story called for the kids crawling along the floor using just their elbows. But did Lanthimos want us to find children crawling on the floor because they can’t use their legs anymore funny? Really?

Characters in movies are fictional, yes I know this. But it also says something about a writer/director who seems to be purposefully positioning his characters in ways where it is impossible to empathize with them. What is left is ultimately is a waste of time. After all, if Lanthimos doesn’t care about whether or not the sacred deer is killed, why should we?