Loach casts an excellent social focus on Ireland's troubled history

Rating: 8/10 (8 August 2006)

This film has provoked considerable debate here in Ireland in addition to the somewhat unfair and misguided controversy elsewhere especially within the UK media.
To me probably the biggest tragedy of this particularly harrowing period of Irish history was not especially the atrocities carried out by the Black and Tan British Mercenaries on Irish civilians and replicated back in kind by IRA flying squads, but rather the fact that when all this was over, then the two opposing factions of Irish, pro and anti treaty turned on each other with a ruthless matching and even surpassing that which they had targeted the British with previously.
This has been hailed in some quarters in Ireland as an accompanying balancing piece of cinema to Neil Jordan Michael Collins. In truth, whereas Michael Collins sought to package the story in a nicely accessible and embraceable to all summary, complete with a romantic interest in the form of Julia Roberts, TWTSTB pursues a much more gritty trademark Loach realism on a wider theme of social issues and morals. It is this feature of the film that helps it rise above the mere story of a period of Irish history and offer an insightful social commentary for our times for those that care to look for it and don't allow themselves to be blinkered by questions of history.
There are parallels to be drawn from this movie to the current situation in Iraq and all the other Imperial incursions in war zones of the 21st century. There are legacies hinted upon in this movie which persist to this day in Ireland: when one of the characters foretells what the treaty will mean for the Catholics of the 6 counties of Northern Ireland or that the proposed boundary commission encompassed within the treaty is merely a ruse and that it will never be fully explored further. Or more pressingly in the light of the current impasse between Big Energy Corporations and residents of the West Coast over Gas, where one of the characters proclaims that freedom for Ireland should mean much more than mere freedom of the people but ownership of the land and all its resources by the people and for the people.
There are parts of this movie that are truly harrowing and the movie as a whole could certainly not be described as particularly uplifting or happy in any way yet within it there are some moment of intensely observed beauty. At varying points the movie brings into focus the personal dilemmas of a doctor turned IRA gunman and a British Army officer surrounded by men driven mad and out of control by their experiences from the slaughter on the Somme battlefields, both perceptive enough to realise the line that they have crossed.
True there are unpleasant scenes involving British Auxiliaries (The dreaded Black and Tans) out of control and truly obnoxious towards the Irish but the accuracy of these scenes can be confirmed by thousands of eyewitness accounts of the time and by the legacy or towns burned by the Black and Tans in reprisals. Equally similarly brutality is shown and portrayed by the IRA flying columns in their summary executions and ambushes, albeit even if most of their intending victims are portrayed in a less than favourable light prior to their demise, as if to somehow make them more worthy of their fate.
There is also a brilliant portrayal of the chinks already appearing in the Irish side even while they fight the Brits, where two very different ideologies are developing who will ultimately turn on each other with neither really emerging victorious or unscathed but both of which will dictate the pace and economic deprivation to come for Ireland from which she will only eventually emerge in the 1990's when the so called Civil War politics are finally laid to rest.
As an insight into this period of Irish History and an accompanying piece to Neil Jordan's "Michael Collins" this is a wonderful piece of film making. But it is also a wider social commentary on the dangers and price of Colonialism and Imperialism at any cost which those nations trying to impose their will and norms on another to this day could do to take note of.