the banshees of inisherin (w&d martin mcdonagh)

There was a time, twenty years ago, as McDonagh was consolidating his reputation as a playwright on the London stage, that an Irish friend of mine came round to supper and lacerated him as a plastic paddy, who was exploiting his roots. His argument was that McDonagh and his brother, raised in Camberwell, were essentially Londoners cashing in on their heritage by writing London-friendly versions of rural Ireland. Everyone knows that it’s never been a hindrance to be Irish if you want to get ahead in London, and most of our greatest English language playwrights have been Irish, through and through. McDonagh may not be Irish through and through but still succeeded in creating apparently authentic tales from the backwaters, often tales which played on masculine venality and stupidity. The plays were imbued with a dark humour and no little violence and were immensely successful.

Since when the playwright has been reinvented as a film director and whilst the rhythms of Irish speech still permeate his work, even when set in the USA, he has left the country in peace for a while, only to return with the Banshees, a folk tale from an island off the west coast of Ireland, imbued with dark humour and calculated violence. It’s a warped folk tale about a dull man who happens to be nice set against a charismatic man who turns out not to be very nice. There’s plenty of affection and mordant wit in a fable about friendship, masculinity and living on small islands. With some bravura acting and delirious greenery, this feels like the most McDonagh script ever written and it really doesn’t matter wether the inspiration came from Donegal or Camberwell, it’s still deliriously effective.

+++

Brief ps after a night in a Forest Hill pub, having touched on Camberwell & Brixton on the night of SK’s death and discussing this film with regard to the director’s relationship with his brother, among others. Noting that the tension within the film between the characters played by Farrell and Gleason so neatly reflects the fraternal tensions and silences within the director’s own environment and how the film is a fine example of the capacity of art to act as a safety valve for the travails of the artist.

three billboards outside ebbing, missouri (w&d martin mcdonagh)

Martin McDonagh has always been a card. From the very start he’s loved to provoke and understood that nothing grabs an audience’s attention like a bit of well-placed, arguably gratuitous violence. Three Billboards feels like a move away from that territory towards something rather more Coen brothers, with Frances McDormand helming a diverse, ensemble cast. Although Mildred, McDormand’s character, is after revenge, this is as much a film about small-town USA as it is about retribution for the rape and murder of her daughter. That particular strand remains somewhat unconvincing, in spite of McDormand giving it all she’s got. The emotional realities of Mildred’s situation remain secondary to the delight the film takes in spiking Trumpian America. Sam Rockwell’s out and out racist cop, made to feel more than at home in the local police station, is the film’s boldest play. McDonagh isn’t afraid to come out with the fairly indisputable fact that it’s not uncommon to come across a racist policeman in the USA. The fact that Rockwell’s story is ultimately redemptive may have caused some controversy, but it’s refreshing to see a film have the honesty to confront a racism that Hollywood never normally recognises. Having said which, in spite of its critical plaudits, Seven Billboards feels like a bit of a pudding. It’s hard to see how you can construct a narrative around the issue of a violent rape and then play the movie for laughs. McDonagh might say that this kind of irreverence is an approach that has always served him well. However, In Bruges had a conceptual freedom which seemed to be more effective for the writer’s intellectual playfulness; whilst the (O)Irish plays functioned within a kind of mythical world of the author’s imagining, no matter how much that might have pissed off the Irish who had really lived and suffered the Troubles. Three Billboards threatens to deal with complex moral problems in a humorous fashion, but in the end it’s mostly humour and not much morality. Which makes for an entertaining if ultimately shallow ride. 

in bruges (w&d martin mcdonagh)

Two hitmen who don't seem like hitmen, trapped together in a hotel room. The implicit allusion to The Dumb Waiter is made explicit by their surnames or pseudonyms: Cranham and Blakey, surnames of the actors who played Pinter's hapless assassins in a TV version of his play.

The Dumb Waiter isn't the only reference point for the literate McDonagh. The other is, of course, Godot. Bruges, the hitmen's hideaway, is in fact a purgatory, a waiting room between life and death. Ray and Ken stare at a painting by Bosch, openly discussing the likelihood of heaven, hell or the other place. In keeping with Pinter's play, these apparent hitmen don't seem come across as violent killers. Ray is raddled with doubt following the accidental killing of a boy, and Ken is coming to the end of his inglorious career.

They may not be regular hitmen, but they are, to the bone, Irishmen. McDonagh made a successful career out of presenting the lugubrious downhome wit of the Irish on the London stage (joining the vast list of Irish dramatists who have been adopted by the British). The film takes his mordant dialogue out of its Irish setting, locating it in the peculiar gothic beauty of Bruges (yet another reference is to Don't Look Now, also a fatalistic drama set in a city of canals). Liberated from its normal context, the humour is an extravagant success, not least in the scenes where the Irishmen come into contact with the various Russians, Canadians and Americans (not to mention the occasional Belgian) who people the city. McDonagh is a writer of wit and panache, and on top of this, he also directs his lead actors with a superb level of understatement, never forcing the joke, letting it tell itself. This is an art honed in the pubs, kitchens, street corners of his homeland. In a sense McDonagh is just a student of an oral tradition, but when he pulls it off, as he does so emphatically in the first hour of the movie, something fresh, funny and alive occurs. Within the straightjacketed world of genre and budgets, it's rare for a writer to be given enough rope to potentially hang himself, something McDonagh seems to have no fear of doing, to wonderful effect.

The serious stuff is perhaps more problematic. In a sense, In Bruges feels like an exercise in tension between plot and character. I would have quite happily watched Gleeson and Farrell wandering around Bruges having their misadventures, without any of the neat plotting that brings Fiennes's Harry to the city and their collective downfall. Whether Gleeson really needs to fly like a fallen angel through the Belgian night, or Farrell demands to be hunted by a psychotic is perhaps questionable, and the closing pursuit seemed like the one moment when the film retreated into banal genre, the soundtrack suddenly intruding and the denouement feeling a little bit too neat.

In Bruges never acquires the menace with which Pinter imbued The Dumb Waiter, (or Don't Look Now) and when it pushes itself towards achieving it, it comes up short. But that doesn't mean to say that McDonagh hasn't conjured something magical out of the fairy tale city, making a remarkably successful transition from stage to screen in a way that few of his contemporaries have managed. The likes of Macpherson, Penhall, Nielson, even Mendes must have watched the film through clenched teeth. Once again an idea of overwhelming simplicity works a treat. In Bruges is an indefatigably entertaining film which also gets away with a meditation on the existence of purgatory. The fact that the director nicks from the likes of Pinter, Beckett and Roeg only leads one to think: more power to his elbow. The pity of it is that more people will not be stealing from them, the old masters, on a more regular basis.