Forget all the glorious notions of revolution and independence; here’s a film that shows the slow push for freedom as the sticky, messy and lengthy process it really is.

It’s a mess that we see through the eyes of Damien O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy), who never wanted to be the man holding the gun. Dragged into a conflict he fought so hard to avoid, forced to use tactics he never before fathomed and brought to the realization that no military victory will fully heal his country’s wounds, O’Donovan is the everyman caught in the eye of the storm. And where movies about the battle for independence tell the tale of smaller armies finding ways to outmaneuver and outgun their oppressors, Mr. Loach’s version is more interested in the way an uprising can turn a society on itself, destroying the fragile peace of a nation, a neighborhood and even a family.

O’Donovan’s sense of peace is shattered quickly. A young doctor with plans to leave Ireland for a tenure at a London hospital, it is during a farewell visit to Peggy’s (Mary Riordan) farm that a gang of Black & Tans, or British peacekeeping forces, invade with guns drawn and force a half-dozen men up against a barn. They inform the group that all public meetings – including sporting events – are henceforth illegal, and as they antagonize the natives, demanding their names in English, they drag Peggy’s non-English speaking grandson (Laurence Barry) inside and beat him to death.

For Damien it is an eye-opening encounter, and all the evidence he needs to cancel his venture abroad, take up arms against these occupiers and put his life on the line to defend home and family. It’s a decision that immediately brings him closer to his brother, Teddy (Padraic Delaney), an activist leader who’s delighted with Damien’s decision to enlist in the Irish Republican Army. And as the two train with their countrymen in the hills, steal weapons from the police, organize attacks in hopes of causing the most possible damage and find within themselves the strength to one day walk into a pub and ambush a gathering of British troops, they discover that guerilla warfare is not as simple as they imagined.

Nor is keeping the peace. As the Anglo-Irish Peace Agreement is announced – the resolution that formed the Irish Free State as an independent domain within the British Empire – the brothers suddenly find themselves at odds with each other, one embracing the treaty as all-out victory and the other decrying it as yet another insult.

There’s a lot of talking in “Wind that Shakes the Barley” – the same brand of unrushed, unfiltered, hyper-realistic talking that has come to be a staple of Mr. Loach’s distinctive style – but what’s interesting here is the way the words, which can admittedly grow dense at times, serve as a counterpoint to the action. While there is something definitive to the events on the battlefield – something concrete about these bullets, bayonets, and this blood – there is something far more ambiguous and uncertain about the debates that follow, questioning the nature of victory, loyalty and heroism.

It’s in the involving eyes of the tortured Mr. Murphy that the movie finds its longevity. From the days of peace to the unlikely battlefields (captured with surprising beauty by Barry Ackroyd, who makes great use of natural light), it’s his evolution from spectator to revolutionary to extremist that helps these later, wordier scenes resonate. For while revolutions begin with blood, they only endure thanks to public consensus – as violence ultimately gives way to words, arguments and, finally, debate.

Bullets, replaced by words.

by: Steven Snyder steven@zertinet.com, Published 2007-06-10