Directed by Ken Loach

Starring Cillian Murphy and Liam Cunningham

‘Twas hard the woeful words to frame to break the ties that bound us. But harder still to bear the shame of foreign chains around us. And so I said, “The mountain glen I’ll seek at morning early.

And join the bold united men, while soft winds shake the barley.”

The rugged, rocky wilderness of County Cork backdrops scenes of sudden violence and ambush. It’s 1920 in Ireland, and a rag-tag band of freedom fighters are hell-bent on expelling the British from their Emerald Isle. It’s no wonder; early scenes in the film show the “Black-and-Tans” (British soldiers) treating the Irish natives as something less than human.

Cillian Murphy stars as Damien O’Donovan, an intelligent and earnest young man ready to leave Ireland to study medicine at a London hospital. But when Black & Tan bullying turns into mindless murder, the tragedy is a catalyst for the county’s young men, including Damien and his older brother, Teddy. They decide to organize a resistance to the British occupation, relying on guerilla tactics to surprise the better-trained, better-equipped British.

The Wind that Shakes the Barley won the coveted Palme d’Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, arguably the most prestigious award bestowed by the high priests of international cinema. They chose a worthy, sober-minded film; the kind that one approaches with respect rather than love.

The director, Ken Loach, has no interest in appealing to your emotions. There is no grandstanding in the film; no mawkish tugs on your heartstrings. There are no picture-postcard landscapes, lyrical set-pieces, or stirring action scenes. The music, mood, and color palette of the film are muted, earthy, unvarnished. The shoot-outs between the IRA and the British are deliberately clumsy, confusing, and strangely intimate. When an Irishman falls, he’s someone every fighter knew by name, may have known their whole lives.

Just as he refuses to supply formulaic action scenes, Loach also refuses easy answers, pat themes. Loach frames the larger questions of the conflict within a family drama. Damien and Teddy, blood brothers-in-arms who had fought together for the same free Ireland, eventually diverge in their ideology. The Treaty of 1921 called for a truce between Britain and Ireland with the establishment of the Irish Free State, which remained nonetheless a dominion of the British Empire. Teddy, a politician, supports the treaty as the first small but necessary step towards an entirely independent Ireland. Damien, a purist, believes the treaty to be a compromise, an insult to everything Irish soldiers fought and died for.

Which brother is correct? The defining moment for Damien already happened earlier in the film. On an isolated windswept heath, Damien executes a fellow Irishman, a young stableboy who had betrayed Teddy to the British out of fear for his family’s safety. Murphy does brilliant work in this scene as ideology battles humanism. “Have you said your prayers?” he asks the boy, his voice trembling with fear for his own compromised humanity.

Damien’s absolutist belief in freeing Ireland from British rule seems rooted in this moment. From that decision on, the sensitive young man who had wanted to heal others has to justify to himself that the Cause was above the life of a fear-stricken boy. No compromises with the British could allow that to be true. Murphy was the right choice for the part; with his icy blue eyes and chiseled cheekbones, he has the ascetic intensity of a man marked for martyrdom.

Later Damien must tell the mother of the boy what he did to her son. She insists that Damien to take him to the grave. They walk for six hours in silence. Once arrived, she lays flowers and a cross on the grave and tells Damien, “I never want to see your face again.”

Naturally any film set in Ireland circa 1920 is shot-through with Catholicism, but Loach—a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist—is less interested in religion than in the socio-economic needs that drive the revolution. There are cosmetic nods to the characters’ faith, such as the sign-of-the-cross over a fallen comrade, but religion for the most part remains in the background.

Nonetheless, The Wind that Shakes the Barley raises difficult and necessary questions about the nature of political ideology in a human context. Loach has been accused in the past of using his films as unsubtle vehicles for his socialist agenda. Not having seen his other films, I couldn’t comment on his oeuvre, but this particular film struck me as essentially humanistic. Consider the anecdote Damian relates about the mother of the boy he killed. And then consider the last line of the movie. Loach is not afraid to make clear the tragic human cost of pitiless political purity.

USCCB rating: A-III – Adults only

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Directed by Martin Scorsese

Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder

Martin Scorsese directing a Merchant-Ivory film might superficially describe The Age of Innocence, but it would do an injustice to both parties. This is a Marty movie through and through—beautifully filmed, expertly acted, and thematically obsessed with guilt, passion, and moral failings.

Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a lawyer from a prominent New York family. His engagement to the sweet but vapid socialite, May Welland (Winona Ryder), has more to do with social standing than with genuine love. This perfunctory arrangement seems satisfactory to Newland, until he meets May’s cousin, the Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), a free-spirited woman arrived from Europe under a cloud of suspicion—her separation from her husband marks her immediately as a social outcast.

In meeting the Countess, Newland is about to embark for the “new land” of real love: she represents to him freedom from the constraints of his claustrophobic culture. Though Newland is reserved where the Countess is outspoken, they are kindred spirits in their desire for new experiences, new vistas. Note how longingly Newland thumbs through his book on Japan. Newland and the Countess fall in love, but their carefully stratified society conspires to keep them apart.

In adapting Edith Wharton’s classic novel of forbidden love in a repressive society, Scorsese has an anthropologists’ obsessive eye for cultural detail—the cutlery, the dainty dishes, the linen, the clothes. And of course the social rituals—the after-dinner brandy & cigar, opera-going audience gazing, and the handwritten notes attached to bouquets of flowers. The attention to surface texture in the film has a transporting effect; it is one of the best period pieces ever made.

Time-traveling to an unfamiliar milieu freed Scorsese’s aesthetic instincts. The Age of Innocence is hardly a polite study of quaint social customs; it is a passionate, adventurous film, dripping with color and breathtaking compositions. Scorsese revels in the texture of the world he and his collaborators have painstakingly recreated, a world where passions are lidded but bubble over in the form of colorful flower bouquets and passionate opera arias. This film belongs on a shortlist of the most physically ravishing films ever made (and not just because of Michelle Pfeiffer), but because Scorsese cuts loose with his painterly style of image-making.

Though a PG-rated period piece might seem like a departure for Scorsese (director of such gritty classics as Taxi Driver and The Departed), he observed that “This film deals with the same matters that can be found in my work in the last 25 years. There is guilt, desire, obsessed passion and the weakness to satisfy that passion.”

Notice how he describes the desire to satisfy passion as a “weakness.” This is what marks Scorsese as a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic filmmaker. Where most directors would romanticize the love affair between Newland and the Countess, Scorsese sees it as doomed from the start, and he is careful not to make either character (especially Newland) too sympathetic. In a calibrated performance, Day-Lewis suggests the agonizing tension beneath Newland’s polite surface—the muscles in his face tighten imperceptibly during certain exchanges—granting the viewer access to the anguish beneath his seeming compliance to a strict cultural code.

In The Age of Innocence, Newland has eaten of the fruit of passion, and the fact that Scorsese does not (necessarily) valorize his passion makes the film that much more interesting. Newland’s choice was between duty and passion, honor and real love. A less astute, less interesting filmmaker than Scorsese would have made the choice a no-brainer, damn the consequences. For most modern storytellers, passion is paramount. Passion is freedom. For Scorsese, passion has a dark side. Although he recognizes the hypocrisy and barely-concealed vindictiveness of aristocratic society, there remains something recognizably Old World about his sensibilities.

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Directed by Milos Forman

Starring F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce

reviewed by John Murphy

Beloved of God

Amadeus nabbed an impressive 8 Academy Awards in 1984, including Best Picture and Best Director for Milos Forman. All awards were well-deserved. Rarely does a movie come along this bursting with life, wit, and energy.

For viewers who think opera is all about shrill-shrieking sopranos in body armor and pigtails, Amadeus makes a great introduction to the life and times of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the towering genius of classical music. As portrayed in this imaginative biopic, Mozart was more of a rock star than a stuffy old composer: rebellious, egotistical, childish, brilliant, and bored with the staid conventions of state-sponsored opera (featuring Grecian characters “so lofty they sound as if they shit marble,” as he so memorably puts it).

Though Mozart makes a delightfully paradoxical protagonist — an infantile genius played to the hilt by a deliriously brilliant Tom Hulce — Amadeus’ most memorable character is Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), Herr Mozart’s rival composer in the Austrian court of Emperor Joseph II (portrayed with dry hilarity by Jeffrey Jones). Vienna, the City of Music, is the seat of an emperor known in his time as “the Musical King” because of his passion for opera. “Actually,” corrects Salieri, “the man had no ear at all. But what did it matter? He adored my music.”

Into Salieri’s self-satisfied sphere steps the musical prodigy, Mozart, who had been the envy of Salieri’s obscure youth: “This man had written his first concerto at the age of four, his first symphony at seven, a full-scale opera at twelve.” Salieri, eager to meet the Infant Phenomenon, wonders as he wanders the court, seeking Mozart: “Did it show? Is talent like that written on the face?”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the man whose very name, ‘Amadeus,’ translates into ‘Beloved of God,’ turns out to be a spoiled, infantile, vulgar little man of little virtue and even less manners; a “giggling, dirty-minded creature” in Salieri’s estimation. This encounter with Genius precipitates in our narrator an existential crisis; how to reconcile Mozart’s heavenly music — “the Voice of God” is how Salieri describes it — with a vain, petulant, puerile creature.

Salieri possesses just enough musical talent to appreciate Mozart’s incomparable genius. He worships Mozart’s gift for music “finished as no music is ever finished. Displace one note, and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.” His face appears transfixed, as if in religious ecstasy, when he sight-reads the miraculously pure sheets of Mozart’s first-drafted music. Salieri burns with the desire, like a “lust” he calls it, to write music such as this, but he can only recognize the talent in another. Yet “why would God choose an obscene child as His instrument?”

This is Salieri’s existential question, the central question of the play and film, and part of the enduring mystery of Mozart, and the enduring mystery of inexplicable genius. If Salieri’s dilemma wasn’t to some degree universal, the film would be less successful than it is. As written, the audience confronts with Salieri God’s apparent caprice when it comes to dispensing talent. Who hasn’t drunk from the bitter cup of envy? In God’s grand scheme of things, only a few lights ever burn as bright as Mozart’s. Imagine all the other painters and sculptors in Michelangelo’s Rome diminished by comparison. Imagine the other filmmakers who stood by while 24-year old Orson Welles released Citizen Kane. Imagine the would-be novelists who read Joseph Conrad (for whom English was a third language) and gave up writing on the spot. “All I ever wanted,” Salieri says, “was to sing to God. He gave me that longing, and then made me mute� Why? Tell me that.” The priest has no answer.

But because it’s such a good question, Salieri belongs to that strange celestial of fallen angels, ranking alongside Milton’s Lucifer, Kubrick’s HAL 9000, and Shakespeare’s Iago as one of the all-time great villains. Like “honest” Iago, the devilish sociopath in Othello, Salieri is a clever, devious man bent on destruction. Because he could never create a work of art to rival Mozart, he chooses to destroy “God’s instrument.”

The difference may be that Iago was something of a creative genius, a kind of puppet master controlling the people around him like marionettes. Salieri, on the other hand, dubs himself the “Patron Saint of Mediocrities.” The script by Peter Shaffer, adapted from his own play, invents a truly fascinating and original bad guy. Abraham does the part justice with a rich, multilayered performance (though I confess I’d love to have seen the great Ian Mckellen incarnate the role on stage). Salieri is by turns preening, bitter, sardonic, and nihilistic, and Abraham covers those bases with apparent ease. Never has sheer mediocrity been so compelling.

Czech director Milos Forman, who also helmed the devastating classic, One Flew Over the Cuckoo�s Nest, seems drawn to stories about vigorous, vital eccentrics (whether McMurphy or Mozart) undone by bitterness and resentment. He orchestrates the elements of Amadeus masterfully. The movie is a harmonious marriage of sight and sound, Mozartian in its effortless wit, grand passions, and lyrical beauty. Certain passages of the film play like big-budgeted Mozart music videos, and I mean that as a compliment. The film is visually and aurally ravishing; “operatic” in the best sense: powerful, epic, and writ large.

Salieri would seethe with jealousy.

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