Here's the round up of scores:
Cinematography: 5/5
Storytelling: 4/5
Acting: 5/5
Entertainment: 3/5
Production Design: 4.5/5
Short review: Boasting some of the most beautiful layered landscapes caught on this side of 21st century filmmaking, The Banshees of Inshiren is seductively complex film beneath it's almost charming tale of two friends when one of them suddenly ends their friendship.
I have always enjoyed Martin McDonaugh's works, In Bruges and Three Billboards are some of my fav comedy drama-thrillers out there and while Banshees does lack a bit of dramatic flair of its predecessors (think of that one-shit sequence in Three Billboards or the final scene of In Bruges), what's here is more refined and tightly woven together, every scene says something about the characters and there's a sense of something ominous going on that's outside of the control of our main characters which adds another dimension of tension into the story that's already building sort of this gritty tense standoff that refuses to resolve itself.
I had a chance to watch the deleted scenes of the film as they were included on Disney+, more films need to do that btw, and I was surprised by how conscious some of those decisions must have been. Every deleted scene adds a new dimension to the character and you can tell that Martin maybe didn't want to show off that side of the character whether it be Padraic's (Farrel) insensitive to his sister's crying or Colm's inability to play out a tone and his frustration following that.
Anyway, I think it's a brilliant grand film. One that looks beautiful and vast while telling a very small but relatable story, all the while taking out the time to show the lives of other characters.
Honestly the impression I got from the movie was that the intention behind it was so ambigious that it amounted to a
"really makes ya think, huh?". I think your interpretation is the one McDonagh was aiming for but for all his strength in writing characters he has the slight flaw of being incapable of making a fucking point in anything he writes.
I liked the final scene though, it (unintentionally) captures something that most stories around the civil war fail to capture which is that the fundemental tensions that caused it were never addressed. Even if you ignore the class tensions that went unresolved in the bourgeois revolution that occured in 1920 (why not, everyone else does). The fundamental goal of national independence was left (and still is) incomplete. The Republic has always been very eager to wash its hands of the direct role it played in causing the Troubles. Irish history tends to end with the civil war and then pretend that the civil rights movement that kicked off the Troubles was solely the fault of colonial forces and not the Irish bourgeoisie selling the North so they could turn around and eliminate what remained of the Irish left. So even though there is no way McDonagh actually thought about any of this when writing it, I find the final scene's affirmation that the violence will continue to be an anachronistic nod to the legacy of the civil war. The fighting started again with the Troubles, and it will probably start anew with reunification.
McDonagh makes fun movies and boring plays, but I find them often of little substance.
Still love the ~~car~~ movie though.
i'm more annoyed at the implication of the futility of it, not parallels themselves. in the portrayal of the movie the conflict between main characters is inflamed by them escalating over trivial things and not talking it out.
if the cop story had more influence (say a gleeson character was besties with that cop more explicitly) and/or earlier in the movie, i think their behavior would have been more explainable. or inversely, the sister trying to leave making farell character more dependent on friends, and then gleeson character dreaming of music writing being like final straw. <- that would lower triviality of conflict, thus making parallel less jarring.
but then again, the movie doesn't play as conventional drama, so making sense of conflict is rather moot point, which is why civil war inclusion slightly annoys me, because it juxtaposes them between each other, while it could have just not and work perfectly well.
still love the ~~car~~ movie though, this is like my nitpick knocking some small part of movie enjoyment, not major flaw by any means.