Read the Oscarnominated film The Banshees of Inisherin

on the other hand Adam McKay and death Phillipshis satirical contemporaries who migrated from popular cinema to prestige film, in projects that reconcile comedy with drama to enhance that satire, Martin McDonagh seems still skating. Inisherin’s Banshees he repeats the structural problems of his previous feature film Three Announcements for a Crime (2017) and aggravates them with the indecisiveness between the lyrical register and the caricature.

McDonagh’s directorial debut in 2008, Na Aim do Boss, remains the Brits’ bestresolved film — an opinion that obviously doesn’t square with the Academy’s choice to embrace McDonagh as an author of dark and eccentric humor from 2018’s Oscars, where the youngest was Feature now competes in nine categories. At first glance, Inisherin’s Banshees appear to be flirting with a return to basics, both in the reunion Colin Farell and Brendan Gleeson (protagonists of Na Mira do Chefe) and in the choice of a single European postcard location.

On paper it is indeed a return, as the plot, set in the 1920s, was first conceived by McDonagh in the theater in the late 1990s: born and raised in London to Irish parents, McDonagh takes the Irish Civil War with him to the background of the prosaic tale of Pádraic (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson), who go from Guinness partners to nearenemies since Colm, an aspiring composer, decides to waste his life in Pádraic’s company.

The premise visibly lends itself to a narrative of the absurd, a long tradition in Beckettinspired theatre. The thoroughly conditioned location on the fictional island of Inisherin also reveals the theatrical origins of the material, which McDonagh then translates into cinema, anchored primarily in the green landscapes of the Irish coast. From afar, the characters watch the noise and smoke of war cannons while the beautiful soundtrack of Carter Burwell, nominated for an Oscar, underlines the melancholy solemnity of these moments. It doesn’t take long for the absurd to share its place and compete with the seriousness of the parable of war.

Of course, absurdity can also serve to address the human condition, and that’s what absurdity is usually for. What doesn’t seem right about Inisherin’s Banshees, like the director’s previous film, is that he doesn’t settle for the absurd. His idea of ​​a prestige narrative necessarily involves a chronicler’s desire, and in his constant search for specificity, McDonagh can only caricature his scenarios. Ebbing, the Missouri town set by Three Billboards, is as fictional as Inisherin but still desperately timely, with deep American accents and culinary tastes that scream at us in their posed specificity.

Inisherin’s Banshees makes matters worse because, in its theatrical minimalism, the film has very little to offer where specificity fails. The music, the drink, the simple habits, the woolen cloaks, the old witch, the pets, everything in the film calls out for some folkloric peculiarity of rural Ireland as if we are faced with a founding parable of national identity but what comes through the filter of absurdity turns out is just the stereotype of the chubby, depressed, drinking Irishman. That the characters are fully aware of themselves and their roles from the very first minute (a third of the film boils down to debating who ends up being the “island nutcase”) is the metalinguistic cherry on the cake blocking missed promising chance of chronic.

Ironically, it’s the caricatures and the characters’ apparent confidence that allow the actors to break free to take the film for themselves, between grimaces and lots of “feck” (reading the profanity with the accent). It’s obvious that Inisherin’s Banshees would hit the Oscars with its four main characters nominated—with variations ranging from sublime in Gleeson’s case to tackier hyperbole in the case of Barry Keoghan. The scenario that Martin McDonagh prepares for his casts is very inviting, allowing for caricatured exaggeration in a context of dramatic seriousness, and few price selector lures can be greater than this.