The Wind That Shakes The Barley is the quietest war movie I’ve ever seen. A story of the Irish War of Independence, a small war on a small island, it manages to convey the horrors of wartime without explosions or flashing tanks.
It’s a movie of men with guns running quietly into buildings, of long marches through the heath and of random acts of brutality. It plays like a tone poem of a war, full of long shots of lush, green Irish forests, rolling hills and mountains and people with flowing red hair riding bicycles down cobblestones.
There is rarely any grounding to the plot, which proceeds more like a series of occurrences. The overall effect is like a memory, or a story recounted– events are out of context, trivial moments are heightened and everything feels the slightest bit unreal. There is a constant undercurrent of outrage, but also of resignation.
The British, naturally, are portrayed as absolute pigs. But as the war gets more complicated, the movie shows how brother can turn against brother, exploring what loyalty, freedom, and family really mean.
The real problem is a significant lack of any character development. Damien (Cillian Murphy), whose arc from reluctant supporter to diehard activist forms the main focus of the movie, is the only character who has any layers whatsoever. Most of the others—Donnacha, Gogan and Michaeil—are stock players, faces in the background who argue and glare and occasionally die. The only exception is Teddy, Damien’s brother, whose development in the war is the reverse of Damien’s and who provides another emotional anchor for the story. Their few scenes together are gorgeous and moving, and Teddy (Padraic Delaney) commands the screen in a way few others do.
Cillian Murphy imbues Damien with emotion in every move, conflicted thoughts in every flash of his eyes. Every decision and moment of understanding rings true, and he can convey an entire struggle of a country in a single line reading. In each moment, from the dramatic to the everyday, he seems both believable and epic.
But the movie is too damn long. Spanning about a decade over the course of two hours, the years creep by. And one can eventually understand the Irish accents, but in one potentially moving scene, as two men discuss the struggle in a jail cell while reading William Blake off the walls, the dialogue’s almost incomprehensible.
In all honesty, though, the lines aren’t really the point. The movie is an incredibly well-made work of art, with a real attention to detail. It’s heartbreaking in a beautiful way, like a dream you can’t remember when you wake up but that stays with you, coloring an otherwise beautiful day.
