In the Land of Saints and Sinners
Directed by Robert Lorenz
Written by Terry Loane and Mark Michael McNally
Stars Liam Neeson, Kerry Condon, Colm Meaney
106 minutes
Rated R
In select theaters March 29

by Jo Rempel, Staff Writer

In The Land of Saints and Sinners is, ostensibly, a weighty historical drama. Its title suggests moral heft, perhaps an allegory or two. Its stars suggest gravitas. Look—sometimes you don’t get what you want in life. Saints uses 1974 Ireland as a backdrop, though it certainly isn’t interested in the Troubles’ inner workings. IRA members talking of “blood money,” “liberation,” and “massacres” are made to sound jargonist at best and specious at worst: these are details which demand that they be felt, or at least for it to be felt that somebody is feeling them. 

But Saints is less interested in political struggle—the lives and deaths of many—than it is in the moral struggle of one man. That is what art tends to, weaving between the general and the particular, trying to find when one stands for the other. This is how we try to feel that wild and intangible thing called morality. Liam Neeson plays Finbar Murphy, a hitman for the Northern Irish with a poetic sensibility: every target must not only dig his grave but plant a tree in it as well. One day, he calls it quits. He goes to his politician boss, McQue (Colm Meaney) and says that he has more to give the world—a life for a life wasn’t enough. McQue replies, beleaguered by the sentimentality: “What is it you’re so anxious to show the world?”

Finbar decides his life’s work will be a garden. He strolls over to the local grocer and buys out their single rack of seeds. He doesn’t get very far with it before trouble comes looking for him: a killer called out of retirement, you know the drill. A new leaf, smothered. 

Said smothering comes at the hands of the aforementioned IRA, loosely. Since this both is and isn’t a political film, the conflict is entirely the product of family drama. Finbar’s enjoyment of village life includes the company of bartender Sinead (Sarah Greene) and her daughter Moya (Michelle Gleason); now Sinead’s abusive brother-in-law Curtis (Desmond Eastwood) is living with her and threatening Moya’s safety: Finbar’s swift exit from retirement is simple vigilantism and has nothing to do with the fact that said brother-in-law is an IRA member. Not just a member, but one whose cell is in hiding after carrying out a bombing down in Belfast. Among the cell’s members is Curtis’ sister Doireann (Kerry Condon). Doireann begins hunting for not only Finbar, but the supposed man who hired his services. She believes this killing has to be more than interpersonal and she’ll bomb the entire village to prove her point. The question of politics is moot when the idea of politicizing tragedy is equivocated with paranoid violence. 

This is Kerry Condon’s biggest screen role yet, and she at least managed to prove herself as a multifaceted performer. You probably know her as Mike’s daughter-in-law on Better Call Saul or as the best part of Banshees of Inisherin, two grade-A supporting roles as the one normal woman caught within a web of men’s suffering. Now she is co-lead and taking an active position in the plot. Sometimes, you see a lifetime of suffering in her, talking about the death of her father and the disappearance of her brother while siphoning the last of a cigarette. That’s where she’s at: a life whittled down to the filter. Mostly she skulks and scowls around town, shot in profile, eyebrows forward. It’s nice, at least, to see a good performer do evil once in a while. When you open with a Hitchcockian bombing sequence—tight close-ups of rear view mirrors and timers and all—where a mother and her children show up at the last minute, sympathy is an uphill battle. Doireann, however, demands little of our sympathy.

And then there’s Neeson, one of the last true movie stars, something of a vortex for sympathy. The fascinating thing about Neeson is that this stardom is a late-career happenstance following the smash-success of Taken in 2008. Neeson was once a stoic, often contrite screen persona (twice a Jesuit, once a Jedi Monk, a shaman-like father in Gangs of New York). Now he’s rougher, less prestigious, our modern Charlton Heston, the new symbol of middle-class indignation. 

Saints is hardly a high-octane thriller, but it is nonetheless “a Liam Neeson movie.” It is a film about ignoring the broader scope of one’s life and, once the dirty work has been done with, shrugging and trying to move on. There’s a big bar shootout that plays out something like “Dear Sister”—so what? Neeson’s world is a necessity, never catharsis. 

Violence is also something to be shrugged off, a nuisance. We live through Neeson not as a man wrestling with the world but as one holding fast to a folksy yen for normalcy. This is how things go: we love isolating snapshot events, love diluting sweeping, sibylline tragedy into a grudge or misunderstanding’s short-term legibility. For all it might want to say, Saints is a dull and mostly painless experience. I’m reminded of a review of John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk, mentioning how Ford’s films must “play really differently depending on the status of patriotism in America at the time of viewing.” Not to say that director Robert Lorenz is Ford’s level of ironic patriotism, or even that of Clint Eastwood, whose late period Lorenz has been a frequent producer on. It’s just that with a massacre analogous to the Troubles happen right now in Palestine, the distortion begins to be too much, one man is never enough to capture a struggle.