Review of The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) by Brandon H — 13 Jul 2009

The direction in this film is interesting. Its distance is often awkward, strange, and leaves me unemotional toward the characters. Then sometimes it's perfect, providing just the right amount of distance and cinematographic elegance to let me feel what I want, but also to evoke what the film intends. It's often really quite brilliant, and yet other times I'm put off. The entire opening half an hour feels slow, amateurish, and clumsy. The acting in this opening, and in many later scenes that are directed with similar style, seems weirdly transparent, like I'm watching an argument between a bunch of bickering actors in a pretentious, melodramatic play, actors who who might actually be trying to out-shout the others to get their moment of screen time. It's an uncomfortable thing to watch, and not the good kind. Plus, some scenes seemed to interrupt some of the logical flowing, rising tension, in awkward ways that push me out of the story.

There are many good, tense scenes in this thing, though, and what's-his-face from Batman Begins gets the job done well. Some of the politics conversations are rich and engaging, others are a little flat. Some of the "action" sequences are smart, appropriately frustrating and angering to watch, and emotional. Some are startling. At first I wasn't sure if I liked this movie more than I resisted it, and after a day of several of the more disturbing, emotional scenes popping back up in my head, I have to say I did. It just feels like yet another film that came close but didn't deliver as well as it could have.