By Armond White

The Wind That Shakes the Barley
Directed by Ken Loach


By now the politically engaged British director Ken Loach should be considered a master filmmaker. When he began applying a documentary’s immediacy to stories of working-class people and culture in the 1960s, his naturalistic style pioneered the look, feel and (seeming) commitment to realism that inspired the next generation of British filmmakers. He has been a paragon ever since, representing a truthful, noncommercial ideal. Problem is, Loach’s dedication to his principles can sometimes go very didactically wrong as happens in his latest movie, the Cannes Film Festival Palm d’Or-winner, The Wind That Shakes the Barley. This account of how Ireland’s 1920 struggle for independence resulted in the Irish Free State (the controversial/compromised accord with the dominion of the British empire), isn’t the masterpiece it’s meant to be. Instead, it has Loach’s master problems.

At his best, Loach combines ideological pith with unfussy visual elegance. Kes, Riff-Raff, Raining Stones and, most recently, Sweet Sixteen (the best film about adolescence since George Washington) showed characters in stages of personal conflict that perfectly reflected inadequate social conditions. Using this method for an epic-size tale of national history, Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty contrive a conflict between two brothers, Damien and Teddy O’Donovan (played by Cillian Murphy and Padraic Delaney). Caught in the historical flux of repression, rebellion and warfare, the O’Donovans become Ireland itself—representing sides in a conflict without first becoming fully realized characterizations.

Loach intends these two men (a dreamer-turned-realist and vice versa) to be revealed through passing observation. They are subordinate to his rapture with the Irish countryside and fascination with communal activity (the dialogue track is rich with argot and conversational pauses—an audio documentary as genuine as Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ classic Irish-soul album Don’t Stand Me Down). Loach once again insists on “realism” rather than drama, emphasizing incidents over personal exposition—scanning groups of people at play, at work or under duress, while avoiding preferential close-ups. Yet Loach artificially stages scenes of British troops abusing Irish natives and peaceful country folk riled into self-defense; these are less “real” than they are evocations of Baghdad: simplistic, predetermined and melodramatic. The spontaneous-seeming style that has made Loach legendary loses impact, resembling its now-corrupted offshoot, “docudrama.”

It’s as if Loach abhors conventional dramatic development in order to resist bourgeois platitudes (including the romanticism of Neil Jordan’s failed Irish epic Michael Collins). Damien and Teddy are only identified by what happens to them (medical student Damien is rushed into fighting, athlete Teddy is tortured by prison guards). Who they are as individuals is muddled, almost desultory. Playing down Murphy and Delaney’s handsomeness, Loach ironically denies his characters the mythic qualities implied by the titular Robert Dwyer Joyce folk tune. These young men embody cultural heritage only in how it relates to Loach’s political program. He wants the emotional sway of The Wind—which should be an Irish version of Bertolucci’s poetic/political epic 1900—to be purely political. This results in many moments of sham realism (pompous British landowners, ignorant country matrons) as offensive as a Michael Winterbottom movie. Winterbottom is the contemporary filmmaker most guilty of distorting the realistic aesthetic Loach developed. The Wind That Shakes the Barley is weakest when it resorts to political grandstanding like Winterbottom’s recent opportunistic third-world dramas In This World and The Road to Guantanamo.

Given his experience and vision, Loach should indeed be a master whose view of human nature transcends politics. (In the last discussion between Damien and Teddy, Murphy’s blue eyes and cherub lips seem not just intransigent but mad. And stout-hearted Delaney crouches into a slump of sodden, pleading regret.) But despite his political background, Loach succumbs to partisanship, like so many artists after 9/11. The Iraq War affects Loach’s epic but also ruinously disinforms it. Loach uses Irish history as an analogy to Britain’s alliance with the U.S. invasion. Not as stupidly insulting as Clint Eastwood turning his recent WWII diptych into an Iraq parallel, The Wind nevertheless refuses to let history be itself. Loach and Laverty reduce the complexity of Ireland/Iraq history into the same old conflicts. Unlike the simplistic, capitalist Eastwood, Loach does his familiar socialist argufying—as if the Anglo-Irish Treaty was bad because it forsook socialist principles.

When Loach stays visionary—showing a silent movie crowd reacting to newsreel footage of the Treaty (reading intertitles aloud, shouting “Erin go bragh” to the image of Eamon de Valera)—The Wind captures social tumult in a remarkable way. It proves Loach can be a real artist, albeit a didactic one.