The Text That Reviews The Movie

Rating: 6/10 (16 September 2008)

The Wind That Shakes The Barley is a very ambivalent movie. I could write several pages about its pros and cons, but I'll try to be more concise here.
TWTSTB laudably deals with an underdealt historical topic, it tries to address a plethora of subjects and tries to be even-handed. And it absolutely isn't, by the way, anti-British. Maybe it's pro-Irish, but that isn't a crime.
From an artistic-technical point of view, the movie is flawed in such a way as to make it somewhat long-winded and boring. Probably the main mistake is that it tries to achieve far too much, that it tries to be too balanced and multi-faceted and thorough. Although this attitude certainly suits its very complex and somewhat ignored subject matter, and would be laudable in a 10-hour TV docu-series, in a two-hour cinema movie it just doesn't fly. Loach should have tried to focus on one or two aspects of the conflict instead.
Then Loach completely fails to build up his characters. Instead he shows us an excessively violent crime being committed by the British right at the beginning, probably to let us know right off the bat which side he's on (erm ... we already guessed, Ken), which casts a propagandistic pall over the entire movie.
I didn't really enjoy watching this movie, but it made me reread about the Irish interbellum struggle, and so did me some good after all.