In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin

I am intrigued by the fact that certain films find a place in my heart, and my appreciation for them grows as time goes by.  In some cases, I may only see a film once, but I remember it fondly.  In other cases there are films that I have seen so many times that I have lost count; I gravitate towards the ones that I know to be good.  I think that a similar thing happens to me when I've seen a particularly unpleasant film; the further I move away from its initial enticement, the more I am able to recognize just how vacant the experience was.  It's this kind of film that I want to stay away from.  If at all possible I want forget the experience, keeping just the faintest reminder as a warning to avoid the next one. 

Martin McDonagh's films In Bruges (2008) and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) each walk a precarious line, and one misstep could have resulted to either, or both tumbling into the "unpleasant" category.  Yet, against all odds, in both films McDonagh was able to able to convince me, contrary to my better judgement, to feel sympathetic to the main character, so much so that I became invested in his success.  In the case of In Bruges, I was drawn to Brendan Gleeson's character, a longtime mob hitman, who is laying low with a rookie hitman played by Colin Farrell.  If you take away the hitman element, these two men could be involved in any profession, and in a certain sense could be facing the same dilemmas that occur over the course of the film; being hitmen just raises the stakes.  Gleeson plays a reluctant hero, someone who has much more to lose on a personal level, than he has to gain in helping his new partner.  McDonagh realizes that the setup isn't sufficient to convince anyone in the audience to care, and focuses on the nuanced relationship that develops between the two men.  A lesser director would have been content to make a quirky movie about hitmen, with clever one-liners, and a shoot-'em-up climactic closing scene.  Instead, McDonagh recognizes that the most interesting thing about the film is the two men at its center, and what they do for a living is ultimately unimportant.  Of course it doesn't hurt that He Who Must Not Be Named shows up for the third act, and seems to throw a monkey wrench in the works.  Once again, a lesser director would have settled for such a development to serve as the finale, but McDonagh sticks with the heart of the film, and delivers an ending worthy of what has come before.

I believe that it would be impossible for me to analyze The Banshees of Inisherin as anything other than a sequel to In Bruges.  It had been a few years since I watched the earlier film, so I had watched it again just before heading off to the theater for Banshees.  It was immediately clear to me that both Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell were playing the same characters from the earlier film, now somehow transported to a small island off the coast of Ireland, sometime around 1923.  The surreal nature of their minimalistic existence made me think that these two men have found themselves in Purgatory some time after the events of the earlier film.  Even now as I write this, after much contemplation,  my position on this theory has only grown stronger, even though there is nothing in the film that explicitly leads me to this conclusion.   And that's not the most interesting part; what's fascinating to me is that McDonagh has flipped the focus, so that in this film I found myself being sympathetic towards Farrell's character, even though both men are still playing the same characters.  It is clear that time has finally taken it's toll on Gleeson's character, and he cannot be gracious to the inexperienced and obnoxious Farrell character for one minute more.  On its surface, the film is about two hitmen who find themselves in Purgatory, and drive each other crazy to the point where one resorts to cutting off his own appendages, but ultimately the film is about the nature of friendship.  McDonagh could have simply created a retread of the earlier film, but he's far more interested in exploring the relationship even further, and won't let death stand in his way.  As the time has elapsed since the afternoon that I watched In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin, my fondness for both has increased.  I think that it's likely that I will gravitate back to both of these films at some time in the future.