"Well, better this than Babel," I recall a gaggle of some like-minded movie writers agreeing after this picture took the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2006. Talk about damning with faint resignation. Barley is hardly an unworthy film — but to some it might seem like something a little worse. It's a film that approaches greatness and then fumbles.
Stalwart leftist director Loach's story (written by his frequent collaborator Paul Laverty) of Irish Republicanism in the early 1920s begins with a remarkably compelling sequence in which a post-sport gathering of some young Irishmen is broken up by some worse-than-thuggish British militiamen, who murder one of their number when he won't (or, as it happens, can't) answer their shrieked questions in English. This horrific event isn't epiphany enough for young Damien (Cillian Murphy) to give up his plans to go to medical school in Britain; no, he has to see more brutality at the train station, whereupon he returns and joins his brother Teddy (Delaney) and friends in guerilla warfare.
Barley's depiction of said warfare is thoroughly clear-eyed and often mortifying, as in the movie's most appallingly moving scene, wherein Damien has to kill a young informer whom he and his fellows once counted as a friend and comrade. Once the British and the rebels reach an uneasy truce, the movie's tensions ratchet up in different and intriguing ways, as factions within the rebellion begin to clash. It's at this point that Barley pitches brother against brother. The once dispassionate Damien wants to continue the fight, while the veteran Teddy, having achieved a position of power in the truce's aftermath, is more interested in establishing order and working from there.
At the picture's outset, Damien and Teddy's brotherhood is treated with such laconic naturalism that some viewers might not even become aware of their kinship until about a half hour into the movie. Their relationship becomes the central fact of the film's last third, and signals the picture's devolution from a bracing examination of the ambiguities and compromises inherent in political process/progress into another Hero's Tale. This is a disappointing development to be sure, but I don't doubt that for many viewers Barley's strengths won't linger in the mind more than its ultimate weakness. One such strength is Murphy's quiet, self-effacing performance; you never sense the blue-eyed dazzler turning on the charm (and Loach shoots him from the side or behind a lot more than any Hollywood director do with a leading man), which is part of how he wins us over.
