"The Banshees of Inisherin"

There’s nothing wrong with Farrell being asked to carry a movie … unless Gleeson is also in it.

The writer, Martin McDonagh, and stars, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, of the wildly entertaining 2008 film In Bruges are back together for The Banshees of Inisherin, a dramedy about two best friends in 1923 on a spectacularly scenic but impoverished island off the west coast of Ireland who have a falling out because Farrell, a farmer, is boring, while Gleeson, a folk musician is creative and therefore decides he shouldn’t be wasting what’s left of his life talking to Farrell.

One problem with the movie is that Gleeson is 21 years older than Farrell, so the basic premise that they are life-long best friends is implausible. Another problem is that while Farrell is a fine actor, and shouldn’t have been subjected to Hollywood declaring him the Next Tom Cruise twenty years ago, Gleeson is a great movie actor, as seen in The General and The Guard, by John Michael McDonagh, Martin’s older brother.

But in The Banshees of Inisherin, Farrell has about three times as much screen time as Gleeson, one of the world’s most imposing movie stars. There’s nothing wrong with Farrell being asked to carry a movie … unless Gleeson is also in it.

Finally, the movie would have worked better as a pure comedy rather than as an increasingly serious drama about two ex-friends squabbling. There’s a general tendency in which artists like Martin McDonagh get more tragedy-oriented by inclination as they age, but they also get more skillful at comedy.

One minor problem is that the film’s costume designer was allowed to run amok creating superb suits and sweaters for the impoverished characters as if they were appearing in Brideshead Revisited at Oxford in 1923 rather than on a rock-strewn Irish island during the Irish Civil War between the Free State and the IRA.

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Originally published in The Unz Review on December 18, 2022.