The Wind That Shakes the Barley is yet another film which demonstrates that not all cinematic violence is gratuitous, desensitizing, and titillating. Ken Loach’s few-holds-barred rural tale of the nascent IRA is as gritty as the soil from which the barley springs—and it’s intended to shake you to your core.

I won’t bore you with a recap of the IRA’s genesis, a condensed history of British-Irish relations, or the theory behind the notion of armed resistance to oppression. It’s enough on all these scores to quote from one of the movie’s characters: “If they bring their savagery over here, we will meet it with a savagery of our own.” And from there, the Irish civil war can be viewed as just one special case of a more general global symptom.

What’s at the core of Barley’s story is the conflict between two brothers. Teddy is a born leader, and following the film’s first ugly incident we already know where Teddy’s sentiments lie. He’s a man of action, and action means getting the thuggish Black and Tans out of Ireland. Damien, on the other hand, is more of a thinker—and he’s got a notion to go off to London to study medicine, even though he and Teddy have seen and experienced the same brutality. When Damien witnesses yet another violent abuse at a train station, he opts to stay and join the resistance. It appears that Teddy and Damien are now on the same team.

But are they? Given their common plight, it’s curious that they weren’t already hitched to the same plow—and there’s plenty of subtext to suggest that Teddy and Damien have a sibling rivalry of sorts that predates the IRA. So when the tough get going, it’s none too surprising that their paths diverge somewhat. Teddy, it turns out, is fighting to be a leader and protector of his people. Damien, it seems, is fighting for something more abstract and philosophical. When the IRA meets with some measure of success, and urban fighter Michael Collins agrees to a truce which trades an a nominally autonomous state for allegiance to the crown, the stage has been set to find out what Damien and Teddy are really made of. It turns out to be long row to hoe.

As far as this brotherly conflict takes us, Loach has managed a passable tale. When it ultimately gets to the point that Damien and Teddy are more representative types than they are flesh-and-blood siblings, this is not so much a fault as an indicator of Loach’s broader topic: the somewhat artificial and genetic lines that we draw between who’s our brother and who’s not. Such boundaries enable and excuse the inhumanity of one man toward another. So what if Teddy and Damien aren’t entirely believable? What they do to each other certainly is. History books and the evening news are both filled with that sort of thing.

Deeper inside The Wind That Shakes the Barley is the symbolism of the song from which the film takes its name. At a wake following the film’s first brutal murder, a village woman sings, unaccompanied, a hauntingly beautiful song of the coming harvest—for the barley is ripe and golden. Yes, it’s not just these brothers who have a history: it’s the whole country. It’s the whole region. It’s humanity. And, to the extent that one buys into that notion of meeting savagery with savagery, we are indeed reaping what has been sown.

Sadly, the Christians on both sides of this particular conflict, as portrayed by Loach, have forgotten that God does not give us what we deserve. Systems of merciless savagery are bound to produce the kind of retributive blood feuds that run through the Old Testament.

It’s sad to see how little, in some regards, society has progressed in 2000 years. When Barley degenerates into what essentially amounts to squabbles over land ownership, it’s easy to see why once-young men grow tired of passionate fighting and inevitably settle for compromise.

I’m also somewhat saddened that the only really new elements that Loach brings to the subject are Cillian Murphy as Damien, the abstraction of brotherly conflict, and graphic torture. I guess I’m far too jaded when it comes to IRA films and studies of human savagery. As a primer for those newer to these subjects, though, Barley is a fine and accomplished entry in the series.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley is being released unrated in the U.S. market. Though I doubt the film would draw an NC-17 from the MPAA, I rather doubt the filmmakers would want an R for this film, either. Its aims are too lofty to be lumped in with, say, Fracture or Hot Fuzz.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a press screening of The Wind That Shakes the Barley.