There was much excitement a few days ago when Naatu Naatu from SS Rajamouli’s blockbuster RRR won the Golden Globe award for best original song of the year, the first ever for an Indian film. One wonders what the Hollywood Foreign Press Association members, who decide the Golden Globes, saw in this rather unexceptional song, but let that be. The oddest choice was the award for Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy, which went to writer-director Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin (2022).
Having watched the film just a week ago on a streaming platform, I was perplexed. Comedy? To my untrained senses, it seemed to be a relentlessly dark tale with no trace of humour and not even a happy ending. I have no idea what definition of “musical” the Golden Globes jury abides by, but other than the fact that one of the two lead characters in the film plays the fiddle and is trying to compose a tune, there is not much music in it, except for the haunting background score by Carter Burwell.
Set in 1923 on the desolately beautiful island of Inisherin, off the coast of Ireland, Banshees... is the story of two men, Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson), who have been inseparable friends and drinking buddies for many years. And then, suddenly one day, Colm tells Pádraic that he wants to end their friendship. He wants Pádraic to never again speak to him. He offers no explanation for his decision, other than that he does not like Pádraic any more.
Obviously, Pádraic finds it all very confusing and difficult to accept, but when he tries to re-establish contact, Colm tells him that every time Pádraic tries to speak to him, he will cut off one of his own fingers. This is, of course, a classic case of cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face, since Colm is an enthusiastic fiddler and an amateur composer. How would he make his music if he sheared off his fingers?
I will avoid spoilers here, except to say that things keep getting more bizarre and bleaker. The story is an allegory of the Irish civil war, whose explosions and gunfire we can sometimes hear from the distant mainland, though the island of Inisherin in untouched by it. Ireland has had a long and troubled history of brothers killing one another in blood feuds and in the name of religion. The island is a microcosm of director McDonagh’s country, where people get into senseless battles that lead to self-destructive behaviour and the death of innocents. Those who are saner simply leave, never to come back.
This is McDonagh’s fourth film and all of them have been marked by unusual plots with unexpected twists and turns. In his first film In Bruges (2008), two hitmen are sent by their boss to cool their heels in the historic town of Bruges in Belgium after one of them botches up a job. It is later revealed that the boss wants hitman 1 to kill hitman 2, but wants hitman 2 to enjoy his last few days in the picturesque town, which the boss loves. The irony is that hitman 2 loathes Bruges and longs to get back to England.
The dialogue is as sharp as a scalpel and the tension builds inexorably up to the climax, where we have to wait till the very last minute to know which ones among the three men will survive. It’s all very funny and also brutal.
His second film, Seven Psychopaths (2012), has a storyline strange enough to defy summarising. Suffice it to say that it involves serial killers — some of them real and some imagined in a screenplay one of the characters is writing, a group of friends who make their living by kidnapping dogs owned by rich people, some vicious mobsters, and a completely wild climax in the middle of a desert. Again, till the final moments, we do not know which of the men will survive and which die violently.
In Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), when, even after seven months of a teenager’s rape and murder, the police have not made any headway with the investigation, the girl’s mother hires three billboards to draw attention to the case. The town’s police chief is sympathetic, but he is also dying from pancreatic cancer. One of the officers is a racist alcoholic, yet he may not be all bad. A midget is in love with the mother.
Three Billboards... saw its share of controversy; several critics found the redemption of the bigoted cop offensive. However, the film won quite a few awards, including the 2017 Golden Globe for Best Film — Drama.
The thread that runs through all of McDonagh’s films is the unpredictability of the plots. Characters grow or change or reveal unexpected traits. Above all, they never cease to surprise. The movies are also difficult to pigeonhole in a specific genre. Is In Bruges a thriller? After all, its three principal characters are criminals and it ends with some gory violence. But many of the scenes will make you laugh out loud. Much of Seven Psychopaths is pure comedy, and then it descends into some very dark chasms. At the end of the film, many viewers may be left with the question: What on earth was that all about?
Three Billboards... is a deep study of human nature, but refuses to be judgemental about people. At the heart of the story is a horrific crime, yet the film is fundamentally about society in the rural American south.
Banshees... too stays true to the unpredictability principle. Perhaps, the film journalists who nominated it for the Golden Globes comedy category were flummoxed — they could not categorise the film and chose the easiest option. Even though, among the four films that McDonagh has written and directed, this is the one that is the least funny.
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