San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A war between friends ends McDonagh trilogy
“The Banshees of Inisherin”
(R) is in Bay Area theaters.
Martin McDonagh grew up in London, but his father hailed from Connemara, County Galway, on the west coast of Ireland. The writer, director and dramatist was 6 the first time he visited the Aran Islands, vividly recalling the clear waters of Galway Bay and the islands’ stone walls. Years later, when he was in his mid-20s, McDonagh returned when Galway’s Druid Theatre Company brought his first play, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” (1996), to the islands.
By then, the Arans were part of McDonagh’s personal mythology. His play, “The Cripple of Inishmaan” (1996), set in 1934, follows the titular character’s ambition to win a role in Robert Flaherty’s seminal documentary, “Man of Aran.” Then in the vicious black comedy “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” (2001), a terrorist unleashes ever-spiraling carnage as he seeks revenge against whoever killed his cat.
That left one island. In a 2010 New York Times interview, he described the thencalled “The Banshees of Inisheer” as a play about a writer that he intended to revisit when he was older.
Instead, McDonagh completes the trilogy on film with “The Banshees of Inisherin,” replacing the real Inisheer with his own invention. Shot on location on Inishmore and on County Mayo’s Achill Island, McDonagh weaves together two distinct geographies to create a mythical Aran island.
“I think making it a madeup island gave us a little bit more leeway, story-wise,” McDonagh told The Chronicle in a recent video interview.
Set in 1923, the film blends dark comedy with poignant drama in depicting the trouble that comes to the isolated community when Colm (Brendan Gleeson) informs his best friend, Pádraic (Colin Farrell), that their relationship is finished. The musician and composer wants to concentrate on his work, something he cannot do with his farmer companion nattering in his ear at the pub. Colm promises dire circumstances should Pádraic speak to him again, but that might be asking too much of goodnatured, dim-witted, voluble Pádraic. Chaos erupts on the island, punctuated by the distant gunfire of the Irish civil war raging across Galway Bay.
“It was a particularly bloody and awful civil war between people who had been on the same side just six months or a year before, and who all more or less believed in the same thing,” McDonagh said. “The suddenness of it and the brutality of it was something that I wanted to mirror in a way.”
Beyond marking an end to McDonagh’s Aran Islands trilogy, “The Banshees of Inisherin” also presents a longawaited reunion for the filmmaker, Gleeson and Farrell,
who starred in McDonagh’s 2008 first feature, “In Bruges.” That bloody comedy about hit men at loose ends in Belgium left the trio eager to work together again. In 2015, he first presented the actors with a script for the movie.
“It was wonderful, very visceral and quite different,” Farrell said of that iteration of the screenplay, sitting with Gleeson in a separate video interview with The Chronicle.
But McDonagh decided the story was too plot heavy and moved on to other projects, including his 2017 Oscar-winning film “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” and 2018 play “A Very Very Very Dark Matter.” Then three years ago, he pulled out his “Banshees” script and gave it another read.
“I saw the first five pages were quite good. … I completely threw out the rest and wrote it from scratch and wrote it quite quickly,” McDonagh said. “I wanted to capture the sadness of a breakup.”
“He changed things up and just made the story a lot more immediate and a lot more intimate,” Farrell said. “The scope of the film was always going to be grand and vast, with the backdrops that we had and the parts of the country we were setting it in, but the core of the film just got more and more intimate, and therefore more and more meaningful for me.”
The film presents a friendship of opposites. Colm is worldly, newly compelled to make music after a lifetime of repressing his ambition. Pádraic is content to ramble about the farm with his miniature donkey Jenny by his side, and to spend hours chatting at the pub.
“Things are driven out of control by human need, from Colm’s point of view,” Gleeson said. “There’s a human need to have made a mark on the world. He wants to do it through his tune. He talks about Mozart, about art in general, leaving something behind that is greater than yourself. He feels he’s failed if he doesn’t do it. And Pádraic won’t leave him alone. Colm just wants to leave something in the world of himself, and that drive causes absolute mayhem.”
“The Banshees of Inisherin” was met with stellar reviews on the festival circuit. After its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, McDonagh won the screenplay prize while Farrell took home the acting award. More recently, the movie won the world cinema audience award at the Mill Valley Film Festival.
To McDonagh, its success lies in Farrell and Gleeson, actors dexterous with comedy and capable of getting to the heart of their characters, as well as in its sometimes brutal, pitch-black story.
“The fun — and ‘fun’ might be the wrong word — of just letting things unravel from a simple starting point of a breakup between guys … just to see their friendship unravel, there was something intriguing about it,” McDonagh said. “Once Brendan makes that threat in the pub, you kind of know things are gonna get pretty dark.”