The Wind That Shakes The Barley

Ireland has had an extraordinary literary output for such a tiny island, but not so much with the movies. When it comes to directors, this and "Bloody Sunday," two great movies about Ireland, were made by Brits. With actors, they've got Colin Farrell, Pierce Brosnan, Liam Neeson, Kenneth Branagh, and Cillian Murphy. No featherweights, but not quite James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, and John Millington Synge. I've read that "The Wind That Shakes The Barley" is the highest grossing independent Irish film ever, beating the mark previously held by "Intermission" and "Man About Dog." Your guess is as good as mine as to what those are about.

In this film, Cillian Murphy is a doctor, brother of a local leader in the IRA-led guerilla warfare against the British during the Irish War of Independence in 1920. Murphy, reluctant at first, gets swept up in the movement as he witnesses the violence against the Irish first-hand. Then we see the ensuing training, ambushes, torture, planned assaults, and executions. There's also talk of Black and Tans, Connolly, Fenians, Dáil Eirann, Auxies, Sinn Fein, 1916, Michael Collins, and Free-Staters.

The theme is summed up by what a character says towards the end: "It's easy to know what you're against, quite another to know what you're for." It's interesting to contrast Murphy's character here with his role as Kitten Braden in "Breakfast on Pluto," where he played a gay Irish cross-dresser who falls in with the IRA and pointedly rejects their violence by throwing their guns into the river. I'm not sure which approach -- violence or pacifism -- is correct, but I do know "Breakfast on Pluto" was a good movie, and so was this.