Fingering “The Banshees of Inisherin”

For a good time, DON’T call Martin McDonagh. At least, when attending one of McDonagh’s plays or movies, don’t expect a lot of easy-going fun. McDonagh, a British-born playwright who’s turned into a successful filmmaker, is about as far as you can get from John Ford, another director who was not born in Ireland but retained a strong family affinity for the auld sod. Ford showed his love for the Irish countryside in 1952’s The Quiet Man, a romantic romp in which John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara struggle to get the best of one another. Fighting and feuding dominate the action, but all’s well that ends well.

 McDonagh’s plays about hard-scrabble Irish country life end far less happily. (I’ll never forget the finale of The Lieutenant of Inishmore. It’s billed as a comedy; I’ll say only that I’m sorry for whomever has to clean up the stage at each performance’s end.)  As a film writer and director, McDonagh has ventured far afield. He went to a Medieval town in Belgium for In Bruges and to the American heartland for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which scooped up seven major Oscar nominations, and won statuettes for Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell. His fourth feature, The Banshees of Inisherin, returns him to a remote Irish village on a rocky isle across the water from where the Irish Civil War is just winding down. Though the island village is far from the shooting, there’s enough anger and confusion in the souls of local inhabitants to fuel some major hostilities. No, they’re not feuding about politics. The fierce emotions that dominate the screen are a simple (or not-so-simple) matter of two men who discover that they can no longer remain drinking buddies and bosom pals. .

 The Banshees of Inisherin grew out of the experience of making In Bruges, in which the roles of two antsy Irish hit-men were played to a fare-thee-well by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. So well did Farrell’s hyperintense Ray play off against Gleeson’s phlegmatic Ken that McDonagh was moved to re-team them in a film about the waning of a friendship. He also worked into his plot Gleeson’s considerable skill on the violin. Gleeson is credited with composing and performing a piece of Irish music that’s essential to the film, and everyone who’s seen it knows how large a role his musical dexterity plays in the unfolding plot.

 Viewers should be prepared for a nightmarishingly gruesome element to the story: McDonagh hardly soft-pedals matters that are horrific to watch. There’s also a sad subplot involving a young man who might be described as the village idiot. That being said, many of the moments I remember are comedic ones, growing out of ther personalities of townsfolk who’ve lived their whole lives on a tiny island.  Minor characters are as colorful as in a John Ford movie, like the publican who’s seen it all, the priest who doesn’t need the confessional to know everybody’s business, and the shopkeeper who shows no shame when, as acting postmistress, she reads the rare important letter that arrives for one of locals.

 The coast of Ireland, as depicted in this film, is a place of rare but stark beauty. The quaint houses, the cozy pub, and the rocky seashore all have a powerful allure, as seen in the brilliant cinematography by Ben Davis, on holiday from his usual superhero flicks. A shout-out to music by the always interesting Carter Burwell and by the eerie portrayal of an ancient local crone, Mrs. McCormack (Sheila Flitton), who’ll show you what a banshee really is.  

 

 

There Will Be Blood: “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”

Last week, by a strange quirk of the calendar, I spoke at my local library following a screening of The Graduate, and then was whisked off to watch a much newer movie, Martin McDonagh’s 2018 awards contender, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. By now—in the course of writing, publishing, and promoting my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How The Graduate Became the Touchstone of a Generation—I must have seen The Graduate at least 150 times. There are various ways to measure a motion picture’s greatness, but the fact that I can watch a fifty-year- old movie 150 times and still get a kick out of it surely signals that it’s far better than average. After all this time I continue to find The Graduate both funny and endearing. It speaks particularly to Baby Boomers, who see it in the context of an especially turbulent period of American history, but I’ve recently chatted with young men and women who find in the situation of Benjamin Braddock an accurate encapsulation of any young person’s desperate attempt to make his or her voice heard. 

That being said, Benjamin’s angst in The Graduate is pretty mild stuff. Yes, he’s  suffering from a failure to communicate with his parents and their cronies. He doesn’t know what he wants out of life, though he’s trying at all costs to avoid going into plastics. He’s a smart, successful, affluent kid who doesn’t appreciate the gifts he’s been given, and can only grasp at the hazy fact that he wants his future to be “different.” And the other unhappy people in The Graduate, like Mrs. Robinson and her daughter Elaine, are equally lacking in the will to face their situations squarely and to arrive at solutions that really work.

In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the problems are far bigger and far more resistant to solutions. Ebbing, Missouri is clearly more hard-scrabble than Beverly Hills, California, but it’s not economic hardship that darkens the lives of these characters. Instead, they suffer from a daunting array of challenges, facing not so much existential angst as genuine anguish. Among the people of Ebbing, Missouri, life is truly grim: there’s a fatal illness and a child’s brutal murder to contemplate, along with one character’s possible PTSD and another’s deeply ingrained propensity to violence. Ebbing is a place filled with more trauma than anyone knows what to do with, though some of the locals deal with tragedy via a surprising sweetness and others with a dark but very funny sense of humor.

Martin McDonagh started out as the playwright responsible for such bleak dramas as The Lieutenant of Inishmore, then segued into filmmaking with 2008’s In Bruges, which he both wrote and directed. His trademark is an intermingling of brutality with dark humor: In the course of In Bruges he uses the teaming of hitmen played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson to hilarious effect. A second feature film, Seven Psychopaths, was far less successful, I’m told. Now, though Irish to his core, McDonagh has set up shop in the American heartland, melding a profanely grieving mother (Frances McDormand) with an unusual good cop/ bad cop combo (Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell) to explore motifs of anger, retribution, and forgiveness in a most unlikely way. McDonagh is certainly not everyone’s cup of blood. Some critics have called this movie overrated, and feel its look at America is superficial and imprecise.  But one thing’s for sure. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Montana.is not a film easily forgotten. And that in itself is a form of greatness.

What a Little Moonlight Can (and Can’t) Do

While a small indie called Moonlight was being nominated for every award in sight, I went to see The Beauty Queen of Leenane. This very dark, very Irish comedy is  the first play of Martin McDonagh, who has also made his mark in the film world by writing and directing In Bruges. That well-regarded 2008 film focuses on two Irish hitmen on the lam, hanging out in the medieval Belgian city. The brogues are thick and the mood is macabre. These characteristics also mark McDonagh plays like the astonishingly bloody The Lieutenant of Inishmore. The Beauty Queen of Leenane is a family story, but hardly one that’s warm and fuzzy. Unfolding in a rustic village outside Galway, it illustrates the mortal combat between a lovelorn middle-aged daughter and a  mother who—though physically feeble—rules the roost.

It’s curious, really, that this play brought me back to my earlier viewing of Moonlight. The similarities are not obvious. The Beauty Queen is rural and Irish; Moonlight is urban and African-American. But both take place in small, tight social enclaves whose members feel themselves shut out of mainstream society. In Beauty Queen it’s poor Irish folk so economically stressed that they need to take lowly jobs among the despised English. In Moonlight it’s a section of Miami where black Americans scramble to get by, often resorting to jobs that border on (or slip over the border into) criminal behavior. That being said, the characters in Moonlight can’t be judged solely by their relationship to the rule of law. The film’s one sympathetic father figure, the man who provides a stabilizing influence in the life of a young outcast, is also – and unabashedly – a drug dealer. (He, played by the charismatic Mahershala Ali, is the one gently cradling young Chiron in the ocean after his first swimming lesson; it’s the visual image most often used to advertise Moonlight, and it captures the film’s blend of tenderness and terror.)

The Beauty Queen pinpoints the complex love/hate  relationship between mother and (grown) daughter. For me possibly the most interesting strand in Moonlight is the relationship between an overstressed mother and her growing son. She (in the person of the magnificent Naomie Harris) is trying hard to raise and to love this young boy, whose shyness and gender confusion make him a natural target for bullies. At the same time, she’s dealing not only with poverty but also with her own drug habit, which causes her to lean over-heavily on a young man who needs her to be strong.   

Both Maureen in The Beauty Queen and Chiron in Moonlight have secrets they won’t admit even to themselves. Chiron’s is that in a world where machismo is prized, he is attracted to men, not women. Director Barry Jenkins’ sensitive handling of this topic is part of the reason this film has gotten so much acclaim. He also does beautiful things with a true ensemble cast, one that includes three young actors playing Chiron in boyhood, adolescence, and young manhood.

But there’s one unfortunate way that the film resembles the play I saw at the Mark Taper Forum. This was a true Irish production from Dublin’s Nomad theatre ensemble, and the accents of the all-Irish cast were at times too opaque to be understood. And Moonlight left me equally flummoxed. I’ve heard the film praised by a critic who mentioned that he’d seen it three times. Frankly, it may take three tries to understand some key plot points that the actors’ style of enunciation – however authentic – kept me from understanding. How frustrating to be shut out by language!