The Banshees of Inisherin versus The Whale –and the Oscars?

Samuel D. Hunter (author)/Aaron Aronofsky (director) versus Martin McDonagh (author/director

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First, a quick summary of both films that won’t do them justice to serve as why the films may be too easily dismissed for the awards I argue they deserve.¹

The Banshees of Inisherin tells the story of two men in a falling out, a friendship gone bad on a small isle that looks out onto Northern Ireland.

The Whale tells the story of a 600-pound man eating himself to death while he tries to connect with a daughter he left when she was eight and he fell in love with a man who’s died and whose sister is his nurse.

But here’s the brilliance: Both films strike the heart while both surprisingly play with triteness to superlative, surprising effect. Character drives both and overturns not only the use of overused metaphors but also flies in the face of the current rage of Marvel Comic films. The latter give us larger than life characters grounded on a genre device that closes á la “deus ex machina” in almost every case.

The two films I argue for here vie, perhaps hopelessly, for the Oscar. Both control the trite and build complex characters not easily summed up, as I did in my opening paragraphs. That’s something the Marvel Comic violence-driven films, at least to my mind, cannot achieve.

The latter excite. The former move.

Both The Banshees of Inisherin and The Whale, like the Marvel Comic genre flicks, stir us with exaggeration, with overstatement, and the overdone, but The Banshess and The Whale do it to grand effect.

In The Banshees of Inisherin, we get Colm who plays the violin and writes songs, followed by his inexplicably and by his own hand cut-off fingers, while we fall in love a bit with a donkey that lives in Padraic and his sister Siobhán’s house. In The Whale, we have 600-pound Charlie whose eating scenes are their own exaggeration.

Brendon Gleeson plays the violin-playing, song-writing Colm who rejects Colin Farrell’s Padraic, a sort of dolt who seems not to get the obvious. Have they been “rowin”? Northern Ireland and the civil war, cannon and rifle fire in the distance, remain throughout the film on the horizon like an easy metaphor. Padraic says, “Good luck to ye. Whatever it is you’re fightin‘ about” —and here we have what might seem to be the trite metaphor of the film, viewed by many as simple parable. But in the hands of McDonagh and the actors, the film and this metaphor rise to character-driven tragi-comedy.

Branden Fraser startles with his heartfelt Charlie’s desire to reach his daughter Ellie, played with force, beauty and anger by Sadie Sink. The marvelous Hung Chao plays the nurse, who loves Charlie. She circles in and out and tightens the stories while Charlie’s some-time friend Thomas, an evangelist full of both feeling and fakery, and Mary, Charlie’s former wife and Ellie’s mother, give insight to love that never dies. Spirituality and its rejection operate on levels that ultimately shoot into the brilliance of lives lived and loved and that can only be described as light—literally, figuratively and remarkably.

The Banshees of Inisherin gives us beautiful sunsets and green scenery while The Whale gives us a two-bedroom apartment and a small porch. Outside are clouds and rain.

Inside both stories are folks with heart: Conflicted, frail, dull, even, in the case of Padraic, played with the touch of the Irish by Farrell; force, played with the touch of the artist by Gleeson; heart, played by Fraser, only with his face and a large realistic prosthetic body that can barely move.

McDonagh directs with a sense of character and the beauty of scene. Aronofsky directs with the echoing metaphor of a closed-in set that parallels the locked in fat body of Charlie and a timeline that begins on a Monday and ends on a Friday.

Both directors get my kudos for understanding what the visual adds to their complex, seemingly one-note characters who exceed what they seem and break us apart.

The Whale gives us the complex interplay of characters who care. Charlie’s daughter’s anger drives the film—as does her need to be loved while she plays rejection in a full-throated performance.

One can tell almost immediately that The Whale is based on a narrative that was written as a play before Hunter wrote the screenplay. I say that because of the power of the slant dialogue, the use of poetry, of the novel Moby Dick that easily could have been a too-easy metaphor but comes into its own much as the too-little read novel has done. We even get Charlie counting his daughter’s prosaic writing in the rhythm of iambic pentameter. Right on the mark, as the film reaches near Shakespearean tragedy.

The Banshees of Inisherin gives us dull Padraic played with endearing charm. His dullness is denied lovingly by his sister who in sweetness lies to him and ultimately makes her own escape from the small world of the island to the larger one where she’ll read.

In the middle of all this Colm bloodies the film again and again and reflects on the senselessness of the war they watch from afar. At the same time, he and the small isle with its beauty captured cinematically by McDonagh and his cinematographer Ben Davis turn us inexorably toward art, toward why we must not live without its praise and spirit—and to why friendship ultimately cannot be denied.

What will the Oscars do? Based on the awards so far, deny best picture for either of these remarkable films.²

Part Three of Lesson 17 on Starting Late in Write it! How to get started follows.

Love,

1. The Whale is not nominated for best picture though Brendan Fraser is nominated for best actor. To read an interview with Fraser: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/movies/brendan-fraser-oscar-the-whale.html

2. Of course, I’ll be watching, starstruck as usual :) for the magic that comes alive on screen.