The Wind That Shakes the Barley

Though quite provocative, I was really disappointed with the anti-British simplicity of this drama. It all centres around two brothers - "Teddy" (Pádraic Delaney) and "Damien" (Cillian Murphy) and the increasingly desperate - and violent - tactics they employed to eject the occupiers from their country. The latter man is not an instant convert to these activities. About to travel to the UK to be a doctor, it's the thuggish squaddies' brutality that convinces him to stay and join his local IRA branch to fight fire with fire. His war-weary brother, on the other hand, is gradually appreciating the stale-mate nature of the predicament and when a settlement is reached between Dublin and London for the "Irish Free State" we find that these siblings are no longer quite on the same side and the conflict turns in on itself. It's not that the British behaved well here, they certainly did not - but the film lacks a key British character to put forward their position. The odious position of Empire, sure, but what, also, of the aspirations of those of a great many Unionists who wanted the status quo and who wanted no truck with the (socialist) republicanism being proposed by "Damien" et al. Again, you can see so much of director Ken Loach's own political persuasion here that he makes no attempt to balance or explain the position from the opposing side, and after a while I found it became a bit of a pontificating rant of a film that illustrated well that expression about one man's terrorist being another's freedom fighter. The then all powerful Catholic church has virtually no role at all here. It's beautifully shot and there are plenty of solid and characterful supporting roles, but no - it could have been better had the director been more interested in offering us more of a objective history rather than his own version of history.