The Banshees of Inisherin

ms. appropriation

You know you have to watch this shite now so you can properly go in on this thread right

i hope i love it or ill be thrown off the island

outwith*

― LaMDA barry-stanners (||||||||), Friday, 30 December 2022 20:20 (four weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Spot the Scots interloper.

we watched it again. I like to watch it. Takes me out of myself.

I enjoyed this for the acting, but agree that as a metaphor or allegory it's pretty thin.

Also a peeve of mine, when the writing is often people repeating the previous line back and forth.

Check on the donkey will you?
You want me to check in the donkey?
Aye, check on the donkey.
Then I'll check on the donkey.

Can I buy you a pint?
You want to buy me a pint?
Yes, I'd like to buy you a pint.
Then stop talking and buy me a pint.
Okay, I'll buy you a pint.

the dialogue is the part of the writing we like, though.

Would have maybe made a better stage play.

I don't know. Shots of cloud islands above land islands also seemed important to success.

see this is why im here and here only the tourist board of the island would like me to remind you all that you can enjoy all of the locations but without many of the paper thin characterisations so this seems like a good time for me to underline that point

Watched this yesterday with reasonably high expectations. I didn’t know a lot about the movie ahead of time, good or bad. But the trailer looked good and it’s got a lot of awards/nominations, so…

Had I fully understood that it was the same guy behind Three Billboards I would have entered with more trepidation.

Anyway, I enjoyed it at the start. Looked good, performances were good, and it walked the line between comedy and drama. And the theme of “friend divorce” resonated.

But the more it went on, the worse it got. To the point that I absolutely hated the whole endeavor by the end. A lot of the reasons have been better articulated in this thread already.

The premise of this film had so much potential but it never dug beyond the initial set of plot points—Colm inexplicably stops being friends with Padraic is unsatisfied by that development. It could have gone *anywhere* from here and as best I can tell McDonagh thought “pat allegory for civil war” was the best option.

I think the thing that frustrates me most was that Colm’s motivations and internal logic were not only inscrutable to Padraic, they seemed to be inscrutable to McDonagh too. His desire to spend the remainder of his life dedicated to artistic/intellectual pursuits was undercut at every turn. Not just the most obvious and perplexing actions with tanked the whole plot, but also little things, like… he didn’t seem all that good or committed to music. He never got his ass out of the pub. He seemed to think that the *only* thing holding back his rewarding life was this one guy’s boring stories. He wasn’t well read nor did he seem to have any desire to be. To think that he had some grand epiphany about how he wanted to spend the rest of his life, and it all boiled down to cutting off all contact with one single guy, in a town where close contact is inevitable (one pub, one church, one store). His position was a farce from the outset and McDonagh never gave the character any real chance to make us believe otherwise. So maybe Colm was actually resigned to his own nihilism from the start and cutting himself off from Padraic was more of a first step toward pure solipsism… which might justify his most dramatic action but again he had no interest in cutting contact with others, and he wasn’t so resigned that he didn’t stay in house at the final climactic moment.

they seemed to be inscrutable to McDonagh too

I was wondering if I missed a metaphor or something, so googled, and found an interview with McDonagh where he conceded the cutting off of fingers was just an idea that came to him, with not much deeper meaning.

“I thought it was interesting that an artist would threaten the thing that allows him to make art,” McDonagh said. “Does that thing make him the artist?”

Yeah, but wtf does it have to do with the movie you actually *made*?

thank you pgwp for that precise dissection of my own hatred of the film
(and hi dmac!)

dmac back to Press the Green Button

xps i don't think colm actually resented padraig because he was a distraction from his musical ambitions. that might have been the story he told himself, but his behavior tells a different story. i think he was jealous that padraig was content with his life on inisherin. colm felt the need to protest his existence, but since he didn't know what *else* he wanted out of life, the protest was both incoherent and directed mostly against himself.

best part of the movie was siobhan correcting colm about mozart. colm was full of shit.

I've been carefully following this discussion to help me decide whether this is the sort of film I would get enjoyment from. so far, the nays have it. carry on. i'm enjoying the discussion on its own merits.

viewing this film as a “pat allegory for civil war” is pretty reductionist, it is entirely enjoyable without even factoring that aspect in.

In fact, I enjoyed it without it; the pat stuff is so pat it barely plays a role. As a modest (more or less) chamber piece about two characters it's fine on its own, minus any attempt at metaphor or allegory. So I'd say go for it, Aimless, it's barely two hours long.

I’m just trying to ascertain McDonagh’s own goals as the writer and filmmaker. The civil war metaphor is there, and the chamber piece about two characters is there. I don’t know which path McDonagh meant to foreground but either way I think he failed

i don't feel that this aspect is foregrounded, or at least, I don't think assessing the film with the idea that this is paramount and integral to the story does it any service, which clearly this discussion has supported. The thing is it is not a pat metaphor, really, and doesn't really work. AT best it's a messy metaphor. As such I think it adds something, but isn't necessary to appreciate the film, which in my mind works much better as an interpersonal character study.

If only we had some way to know what the director’s intention was!
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FmhLdvTXgAAZoXt?format=jpg&name=large

Like, I don’t care if you personally choose to ignore that, as I said upthread gritting my teeth and saying “Death of the author” is basically my only remaining way of enjoying the stuff I did liked. But it’s a total lie to say that obvious link wasn’t intended. It’s really, really, really not remotely a clever film.

every time I see that quote again I want him to die a horrible death, even more.

I mean it would be odd to set the film in that extremely specific period of Irish history if you didn't mean something by it. Of course you could certainly have the same story take place in a contemporary setting but there would be less opportunity for cheap metaphor and donkey-based humour (although there appear to be a not insignificant amount of Americans tweeting about how they thought the film was set in the present day. So who knows)

I liked this film.

I took a lot more away from it about the idea of male stubbornness and refusal to deal with depression/emotions in a healthy way, than the obvious civil war analoy (which was really only a tacked-on couple of comments and didnt seem the point, to me).

jamelle bouie with a souring evaluation of mcdonagh films

https://letterboxd.com/jbouie/film/three-billboards-outside-ebbing-missouri/

That’s a great evaluation. Plenty of people posting in this thread could learn from that!

Saw this last night and never quite believed in it. I've slept on it and in honesty, cast and photography aside (big ifs, sure), this felt televisual to me; if I'd watched it out of the corner of my eye, it could have been a Sunday night misery-porn fiesta to watch before bed - just with a big SCRIPT chucked at it. And because of all that, I felt like the cast - Farrell in particular - were desperately trying to convince the audience that any of this was vaguely plausible. I don't claim to have any deep understanding of the civil war but a couple of times I asked myself out loud 'if this is some cheap allegory for the civil war, then jesus'.

Great thread, ilx.

The Civil War allegory really provides zero of what I liked about the movie, successful or not. To me it works better as an allegory about undiagnosed mental illness, as well as provincial resentments and hostilities. And yes, it works even better than that as an acting showcase, so you could argue McDonough got away with one here.

perhaps the point of the civil war allegory is that while colm's stand was, from his perspective, principled, he ultimately hurt himself most of all. he must represent the anti-treaty side of the conflict imo.

he was after all within his rights to demand full independence from padraig. but the bitterness with which he pursued this end showed that he cared more about the conflict itself than the freedom he said he wanted. i think the movie is saying something like that. i do not know enough about irish history to say whether this is a fair evaluation of the IRA though.

This individual thinks the film is more telling about Covid-19.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/feb/14/cut-off-from-the-main-how-films-about-islands-reflect-our-anxious-divided-times

i hope that individual got a pass mark for whatever module that collection of sentences was originally submitted for

if mcdonagh has the moral fibre to set his next work in eighties london and tackle whatever complex tableau of identity and trauma most conveniently presents itself to the characters thus situated I'll at least take back some of my current most deeply established opinions about him- that he is the cheapest type of faux profound gifted stylist. hes barely a level above the political or social commentary that could be reasonably attributed to a gaultier collection in 1997 oh how clever how daring nb ive still not seen this

Uhhhh do you mind darraghmac my enjoyment of the film wasn’t affected at all by the stuff that doesn’t matter to me

xxp

yeah but what about the graun piece? (ho ho ho). I used to know this guy known as DJ Dave who once made this hilarious "don't take smack video" whilst on a vid-editing course offered to the terminally unemployed in the mid 90's. He was a fucking idiot, but still probably better suited to writing allegorical dramas about [whatever] than this cunt, still more talented.

nb i still think mcdonagh can write dialogue that gives actors a great platform which isnt nothing

hes been very ill served by plaudits is i think my take

I think it's more a case of good actors managing to cast off from a rotten platform than t'other way round.

but I did 3 times watch it over the christmas period and enjoyed it tbh

its fair possible that im only avoiding this because of the weight attributed it! if nobody gave mcdonagh undue credit thematically id enjoy all his stuff perhaps

insofar as i grew up at all or anywhere i grew up within three miles of seventy percent of the exterior shots so i will out of duty catch it at some stage im sure

A smart friend whose tastes in film are at best erratic recommended Calvary, which somehow didn't catch my attention in 2014; we had no idea the directors were related, for starters. It's better about its Local Colo(u)r than Banshees, though it collapses into meanwhile-back-at staging. It didn't earn its ending. Brendan Gleason, relying on that Stephen Rea thing of investing monosyllables with untapped reserves of feeling, is by far the best thing about it.

I finally got around to watching this yesterday, and here are my thoughts. I had them before opening this delightful thread, but I did my due diligence and caught up so my words may be colored by the opinions already stated here:
- The beginning of the movie sets itself up as this parable about the man who thought he was interesting in opposition to the man he feels is dull (but identifies as "nice"). It quickly becomes clear they live in a very small community and avoiding interaction is going to be impossible. Then! We get this self-mutilation threat should the nice man continue his interactions. Now we're cooking!
- This kind of works for a while. We get the sidebar bits with Dominic and Siobhán, which are delightful if somewhat harrowing in Dominic's case.
- We get some indications, not-so-subtly dropped, that there is a civil war going on across the way. Uh oh, I smell an allegory.
- It wasn't initially clear but that was a bad smell. It gets worse.

Overall, great acting, excellent dialogue in parts, the plot as a whole is kind of a clunker

McDonagh definitely writes the slightly exaggerated dialogue that makes the characters come off a bit larger, definitely reminiscent of what you get in stage plays where people in the cheap seats might not be getting all the small bits and expressions so everything's a little over-telegraphed when it's on film. I would question whether it's intentional that the characters come off as caricatures, but I don't think as a writer he's even considered doing things differently.

There's this kind of belligerent Tarantino-ness to his dialogue which is pretty fun but maybe tiring after awhile

I saw the trailer for this a few months ago and, for whatever reason, figured it wasn't for me. But a friend urged me to see it after relating a recent situation in my own life virtually identical to Pádraic's; equally blindsided, no explanation (Colm did have one), a friend of 50 years.

I can't say for sure how I would have felt absent that--I don't know that it would have made all that much difference--but I really liked it. I don't know if Colm's extreme course of action (without being more specific than that if you haven't seen it) was necessary--I think the film would have been as strong without that--but obviously it's central to the film. Going to hazard a guess that I wouldn't think nearly as highly of the two acting categories that won AAs (only one of which I'll get around to seeing) as the two here that were nominated. Also think Brendan Gleeson should have been nominated.

He was!

Pádraic is genuinely nice. I was thinking about two people I have a certain degree of involvement with in my small town who are always posting those terrible memes on Facebook about how to properly treat people and what it means to be a good person. They're both a few years older than I am. I can't think of two ruder, less nice people. Are they even remotely aware of the disconnect between the stuff they post and the way they actually conduct themselves?

i’m not puttin’ me donkey outside when i’m sad either.

The tiny donkey was my favorite character in the movie.

I can't believe there were two prominent donkey films this year. That's got to be a record (by two) for almost every year ever.