by Kevin Bresnahan, Contributor

Saint Patrick’s Day falls on a Friday this year. I think we all know what that means. Even more “revelry” in the streets and barrooms across the city, even more lime-green vomit trickling in the gutters, even more mindless plastic shamrock bullshit. 

Just as it should be.

But these days I’m too old to brawl as I (absolutely never) used to do growing up in the Boston area. These days my Saint Patrick’s is a quiet evening with a proper New England boiled dinner – gray corned beef, not the turgid red carrion they brine with saltpeter in New York and Pennsylvania – and a nice glass of Jameson. And a movie about Ireland. 

This year I saw something very interesting in that line, Martin McDonagh’s Banshees of Inisherin. But I’ll get to that later. 

The first great Saint Paddy’s movie (for the love of God, never Saint Patty’s, okay?) is The Quiet Man (1952), the movie John Ford always longed to make. Filmmakers like Coppola and Scorsese will go on to interrogate their Italian histories in films which play out, mostly, in America. But for John Ford, born Jack Feeney the son of immigrants in a tenement in an Irish ghetto in Portland, Maine, the story was always about the return to the old place. 

By 1952 he had made so many highly successful westerns and filled the coffers of so many studios that they had to let him make his passion project, his little Irish movie.

Modern Irish folks aren’t thrilled with Ford’s sentimental dream of their country. The novelist Roddy Doyle wrote hundreds of pages on how much he hates it. But for Americans at the time, it was a fresh take from Ford. He had amassed a career making bold shoot-em-ups. Here was a sweet little love story. It was, for John Ford, an art film. 

John Wayne (born Marion Morrison, aka Mac Morris) is Sean Thornton, the mysterious Yank come to a small village in the Mayo countryside, looking right at home in a scally cap and woolens. He seems like a good egg and before long he’s made a number of friends, and one unfortunate enemy in the blowhard of a local landowner who fancies himself a “squire.” Thornton also finds love, and, in that first scene when Maureen O’Hara comes striding across the glen tending a herd of sheep, so did I. 

I am reminded of the bit in Star Trek: TNG when Commander Ryker comes across an obvious O’Hara look-alike flying through space with a shipful of space Irish (don’t ask) and Number One stares at her with such unabashed star-lust that she says:

What’s the matter? Have ye never seen a woman before?

And Ryker, the old hound, says, I thought I had.

Anyway, this is roughly my reaction when first I see Maureen O’Hara play Mary Kate Danaher. Problem is, Mary Kate happens to be the sister of the obstreperous squire. Also, why did the quiet man leave America? And why won’t he fight for his woman?

This is a great little story, hinging on trauma, pride, and gender. But the story ends happily, with one of the great fist fights in the history of the cinema. 

The thing is, it’s the village itself, the Yeatsian Innisfree, and its lineup of lovable if not believable characters, sweetly comforting cartoons, that takes pride of place in this picture. John Ford had already told the truth about Ireland in 1935’s The Informer, but in this picture he gave us an idyll. It’s a comforting dream for newly prosperous Irish Americans. The Quiet Man is America’s Ireland, a sweet fantasy of thatched roofs and smoky pubs. Even the IRA men are more like puckish college boys. This is what the Irish call paddywhackery. It’s pretty but it isn’t Ireland. 

The Field (Jim Sheridan, 1990) is what was actually going on. Mournful uilleanns, the more lyrical bagpipes the Irish favor over the bombastic Scottish version, open the picture, and we watch an old man and his son harvesting seaweed from the cove, to be used as fertilizer on the rocky field which Richard Harris, as Bull McCabe, has farmed as a tenant farmer (basically a sharecropper) for a lifetime. Now he would like to own his own land, before he dies, so he can pass it along to his son, a young, hungry Sean Bean. 

The plot is not unlike The Quiet Man, in a way, with a disputed piece of land, a rich widow, a bully boy local mucky-muck, and an interloping American. But now it is rendered through a lens of muddy, gorgeous realism. The poverty and violence in The Field are not as funny as they are in The Quiet Man.

Banshees of Inisherin (2022) takes place at that same fertile turbulent time, just after the birth of a free Ireland. But this one isn’t about land, it’s about two men, and their friendship.

Colin Farrell has turned in some very fine performances in his day, not least in Banshees writer-director Martin McDonagh’s debut picture, In Bruges. But here Farrell gives us a character, Pádraic Ó Súilleabháin, so flesh-like and vulnerable, so purely and sadly human, it’s like watching animal torture. But the animal torture comes later. 

Anybody expecting a Waking Ned Devine-like folly in the Irish countryside has come to the wrong shop. In the end, McDonagh’s story is a comment on the violence of modern Ireland and the terrible realization that the fight might never end. 

I was inclined to avoid movies about the Anglo-Irish Wars. We’ve heard it all before, haven’t we, and I wanted to give a fresh take on Ireland. But I have come to see that the long twilight struggle with the British is too intimately tied up with the Irish story to ignore. That’s the trouble with the Troubles. They want to swallow up everything. 

In The Crying Game (1992) director Neil Jordan’s muse, the Bob Geldof-like Stephen Rea, is Fergus, a soldier in the terrorist Irish Republican Army carrying out kidnappings and guerilla attacks against the Crown forces in Northern Ireland. But this Fergus breaks the cardinal rule of terrorism: he allows his victim, British soldier Jody (Forest Whitaker), to become human. And in a botched rescue attempt by the British forces, Jody is killed. Fergus, sick of it all, turns away from the war. 

Ireland is not safe for him any more – the rule in the IRA is “once in, never out” – so Fergus flees to London where he takes up a noncommittal job. But even across the water he can’t shake what happened from his head, and he ends up seeking out Jody’s girlfriend, a chanteuse called Dil, whose photo the doomed Brit had shown him in Ulster. What follows is a twisty narrative that plays with love, loyalty, guilt and – spoiler alert – transgender identity.

Jaye Davison is Dil, and he is mesmerizing as her. But her transgressive beauty and innocence are too much, and come crashing up against Catholic masculinity. Some people claim the Irish are sexually repressed, but that’s not it; you don’t get eleven kids in a family by being sexually repressed. But there is this ironclad set of rules to define the male and female, and desiring to transgress them can evoke a monstrous sense of shame. 

Catholic sexual morality. It’s a hell of a drug. 

Sometimes, when in a hyperbolic frame of mind, it occurs to me that whatever harm the Brits inflicted on Ireland pales before the harm inflicted on her by her own church. 

Among many indignities inflicted on the Irish by Catholicism was a peculiar institution called the Magdalen Laundries, reform schools to which underage pregnant girls were sent to work away the shame of having fallen. 

Another way to describe underage pregnant girls, by the way, is rape victims.

Philomena Lee, the title character of Philomena (Stephen Frears, 2013) played by the infinitely talented Judy Dench, was one of these girls. And as in many cases, when Philomena delivered her furtive baby it was taken away to be adopted by a rich Irish American couple from Boston. The couple had offered a generous donation to the Church in return for the human child.

The children of the Irish were stolen away and sold to wealthy Irish Americans, the way the famine stole their children, and emigration, and even back into the time when the faeries would come out of their mounds to steal human children. Souls have always been Ireland’s main export. 

Years later, along with the indispensable Steve Coogan as journalist Martin Sixsmith, Philomena will go on a search for the little boy once wrenched from her arms by the hard-hearted nuns. The pursuit is gripping, and far flung. And hilarious. Coogan is incapable of not being funny, and Dench reveals a comic side here that is pitch-perfect. 

In the end Philomena will come to know her stolen child, in a way. And her eyes will be opened. In a profound act of grace she will transcend the tragic past to wriggle free of the last link of the chain which had bound the Irish, oppressed them, circumscribed their lives.

In the beautifully animated Wolfwalkers (Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart, 2020) it is the year 1650, and Fundamentalist Protestant forces from England have occupied the ancient Irish town of Kilkenny. 

The gates have been slammed shut, closing out the countryside and, not least, the wolves which run free in the forest. The Lord Protector, a fictionalized version of English tyrant Oliver Cromwell, sees the freedom of the forests as being akin with the liberty of the people of Kilkenny. He is in favor of neither. Cromwell was the first modern dictator, in that he did not simply want political power, but he also wanted psychological power over the population as well. He wanted to rule your thoughts. 

But Puritans or no Puritans, a young English girl called Robin, an immigrant to Ireland, is not the sort of kid to stay safe behind walls, and soon enough she has slipped into the forest where she meets a friend, Mebh, who introduces her to the beauties and mysteries of the woods. It soon becomes clear that Mebh is no ordinary girl, and maybe neither is Robin. Robin will meet nature on these nocturnal jaunts, and her own nature, too. 

The wolfwalkers, the sometimes-human sometimes-wolves which the Irish call faoladh, run through the night to the accompaniment of Aurora’s “Running with the Wolves.” It is a glorious animated sequence that might seem a little on the nose, but it isn’t – it’s perfect. The pale blues of nighttime animation, the silvery movement of the wolves, the visceral joy of being alive. The whole sequence revels in the sheer pleasure of being captivated by cinema. You could not have chiseled the smile off my face as I watched. 

It makes me think of this bit from my favorite poem, by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats:

The Stolen Child:
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.

In the end our Robin comes to know the wildness of the countryside, to embrace it, to be untamed by it and to find her true self. The Lord Protector may wish to build that wall, but the deep old forest cannot be defeated; nature itself cannot be defeated. Nor can, we may suppose, the wildness in the Irish people themselves. 

But that’s all subtext. The picture itself is glorious, the animation is both primitive and incredibly expressive, like medieval illumination. The colors, the movement, the shimmer of the moon on a rippling stream and the fleet-footed wolves coursing through the night is like the most frightening and best dream you ever had. 

One of the great human triumphs of the 20th century was the breaking of the political bonds that had oppressed the Irish nation for most of a millennium. But the other story, the one which is still playing out, is about the liberation of the Irish people from the chains of mental and spiritual oppression, and the wonderful flowering of art and song, creativity and greed that has been unleashed.

Anyway, Paddy’s Day falls on a Friday this year. Enjoy yourself. But please don’t drink green beer. Or do. Whatever.