The Wind That Shakes the Barley aspires to the revolutionary gravitas of Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, but it plays like a weaker retread of Ken Loach's 1995 Spanish Civil War opus Land and Freedom. Whatever the intentions of Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty, it says something that their depiction of disenchantment and compromise is more gripping than the sky-high hopes expressed in its earlier scenes. The film concerns two brothers, Damien (Cillian Murphy) and Teddy (Padraic Delaney), who fight the British for Irish independence. Their idealism withstands violence, but the possibility of a flawed peace treaty with the U.K. tears them apart.
Like Land and Freedom, The Wind That Shakes the Barley is most vital when its characters are arguing about politics. It's very hard to shoot such conflicts without making them feel like a history class exercise, but the cast performs them with a rare conviction and believably. Too bad the film expresses its radical content — which drew the ire of the right-wing British press — in such a prosaic style. Its dance with melodrama feels cheap; it might have worked better if it had given into the genre more wholeheartedly. As it is, you've got a painfully strained conceit: a conflicted pair of brothers representing Ireland's divided nature. It's particularly blunt in the film's final stretch. Still, Loach does a decent job of evoking an evanescent moment when real political change was possible. — Steve Erickson