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#351 (no ads): McDonagh's Discontented Duos Pt. 2 — The Banshees of Inisherin (Patreon)

Published:
2022-11-22 05:01:00
Imported:
2022-11

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14 years after Martin McDonagh’s feature film directorial debut In Bruges, he has reunited with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson for The Banshees of Inisherin, a quieter and arguably much darker film about a different splintered friendship, with similar ideas about morality, mortality, and guilt. We’re joined once again by critic Siddhant Adlakha to talk over some of those ideas as they play out in Banshees, how they color where our sympathies lie in the civil war between the film’s protagonists, and how much any of that matters when considering this story as a metaphor. Then we bring In Bruges into the discussion to consider how both films tap into McDonagh’s particular cinematic and comedic rhythms, use their female characters as a corrective to impulsive and irrational male behavior, and conclude with a choose-your-ending ambiguity. And in Your Next Picture Show, we talk over a different pairing we considered for this week and our reactions to the film that inspired it: Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.

Please share your comments, thoughts, and questions about In Bruges, The Banshees of Inisherin, or anything else in the world of film, by sending an email to comments@nextpictureshow.net, leaving a short voicemail at 773-234-9730, or commenting on our Patreon (patreon.com/NextPictureShow), where you can also find bonus episodes and more.

Outro music: “Jenny Was a Friend of Mine” by The Killers

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Comments

Elizabeth Kite

I caught this last week and really enjoyed it, and really liked your conversation here. I read this movie in a much darker way than any of you seemed to. (spoilers ahead) I saw this mostly as a movie about loneliness and how people cope with it or don't. McDonagh effectively paints a picture of how bleak life on Inisherin is: there's nothing to do (as you guys noted), and you're alternately very isolated and smothered by a small community of ppl who open your mail and know everything you ever did. (Maybe this is colored by a vacation visit to Inishmor where our very nice local tour guide nevertheless described it as a bleak place that very few ppl want to live and even the English couldn't be bothered to subjugate.) Podraig has carved out some warmth for himself, between his sister, Jenny, and Colm. When Colm abruptly ends their friendship, he can't handle the impending isolation. Siobhan copes with the isolation of Inisherin by leaving for the mainland. Dominic tries to cope with this by befriending Podraig and romancing Siobhan, but when that doesn't work, he commits suicide. I wish you'd talked more about Dominic, since he's one of the more interesting characters. Barry Keoghan takes a role that could be a collection of tics or a shallow fool role and gives it such depth and idiosyncratic weirdness. I think there's also a hint that part of Colm's plan might be depression/a suicidal impulse. (Planning to focus on his fiddle playing by cutting off his fingers is such an obviously nonsensical plan that there must be something else!) The priest mentions past references of despair, and Colm affirms that he doesn't plan to "do" anything, which reads differently after Podraig's threats. It's hard not to root for Podraig to follow Siobhan to the mainland. With Jenny dead and the war over, there's nothing keeping him on the island. It's like he's so committed to this relationship with Colm that he'd rather live miserably in the embers of it than abandon it completely.