On Despair and such things
In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, his last outing, Martin McDonagh made a movie about vengeance, violence, and acceptance of death. It was a targicomedy of sorts. The story is set in a small, remote and fictional town with an insidiously pessimistic name — Ebbing, Missouri. A town where the joy of life seems to be receding with every passing day. There is a recurrent layer of melancholy throughout the movie. It’s almost like a cornerstone for a McDonagh movie.
The Banshees of Inisherin is not so different. There is that masculine disenchantment he weaves through this story of two friends whose friendship is ending. Colin Farrell plays a grinning, gratingly “nice” village dullard Pádraic. Glen Gleeson plays a sullen loner, Colm. The two men could not be more different in their respective dispositions. The movie starts off with Colm deciding to suddenly end his friendship with Pádraic. Colm seems to have checked out of life all together and his regrets over things he will never get to do in his life are only mounting. With him being all too aware of his looming mortality, he is hellbent on leaving a piece of his legacy. He argues that geniuses of the past, such as Mozart, are still remembered for their work and not for them being “nice”. So, Colm is out composing a fiddle tune (that shares its name with the movie title). And that’s why he decides to end his friendship with Pádraic because he is dull. Pádraic’s claims of him being “nice” is not enough to cut it.
Meanwhile, Pádraic’s sister Siobhán, with whom he is living, experiences her own list of miseries and can’t wait to get out of the forsaken island to find a more prosperous life for herself. And when she eventually leaves, it is just Pádraic and his pet donkey, Jenny. The conflict between Colm and Pádraic is supposed to serve as a handy metaphor for Ireland’s Civil War happening at that time, but to me the movie is beyond all that. Without giving away what exactly happens in the movie, it’s sufficient to say that there is a sequence of tragic events that unfolds with Colm and Pádraic not exactly resolving their conflict for good.
The movie is a somber depiction of how bitter, mediocre, pseudo intellect persons battling depression could scapegoat their own failures and insecurities on their simple, “nice”, and “dull” friends. And how they could unintentionally project their perceived failures onto innocent others and thereby harming them.
The beauty of this movie though may come from observing the undistinguished difficulties that are involved in the messy act of ending a friendship. Ending things with your best mate of many years can be very disorienting. And that’s what McDonagh explores in this movie exceptionally well. And then there is another character, Dominic, who is the village cop’s “dull” son. Dominic, with his very funny vulgar brashness, never quite camouflages his character’s poignant vulnerability and that’s why this character stood out for its own miserable story despite its very short screen time.
Every character in the movie is self-loathing and is dealing with some amount of despair. And that just how life is for these people.
The Banshees of Inisherin is an acute study of the rot that arises from remaining stuck in the same horrible, stifling place your entire life.
It’s a feckin’ depressing film.
It’s a feckin’ delightful film.
It’s a feckin’ transfixing film.
It’s a feckin’ banger of a film.
