TAKING SIDES

As any aisle-hugging aesthete will tell you, the look, feel, and form of a film are just as important as its “themes.” Indeed, the thematic material of a movie can no more easily be separated from the cinematic means that produce it than melodies can be separated from notes. Still, critics do it. Readers, we tell ourselves, have the right to know what a movie is ostensibly about. So I would have to say that Ken Loach’s wonderful “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last May, is about a savage little corner of the Irish rebellion against the British in the years 1920 to 1922; that, more particularly, it’s about two brothers from County Cork who fight the vicious English counter-revolutionary force, the Black and Tans, but then part company over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which established the Irish Free State but preserved its dependent status as a “dominion” within the British Empire. One brother, Damien (Cillian Murphy), wants complete separation from the United Kingdom and a socialist revolution in Ireland; the other, Teddy (Pádraic Delaney), is willing to accept the treaty as the best possible outcome for the moment. The British are gone (except from Northern Ireland), but revolutionary solidarity among the Irish collapses into civil war. There’s our theme: the revolution devours its children.

But, even as I write these words, I know that they barely touch what’s onscreen. Ken Loach, an old-line social realist, years ago made studies of English working-class life, “Poor Cow” and “Kes,” that were well received here, but, in recent times, his earnestness has worked as a damper. He had become so serious a man that you felt abashed if you saw his movies, guilty if you skipped them. Yet “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” (the prolix title comes from an old Irish revolutionary song) is a beautifully realized work and perhaps Loach’s best film. He and the cinematographer Barry Ackroyd have produced a slightly dark, saturated color palette that preserves the raw dampness of the Irish weather, the even gray light, the flintiness of the stone cottages. The hilly landscapes are lovely without being picturesque (none of that travel-ad Irish green); the interiors are illuminated by natural light seeping through the windows, without the usual artificial “fill” that pulls faces, or corners of rooms, out of the shadows.

What Loach has produced, working with a script by Paul Laverty, is an anti-spectacular spectacle: the British military cars, tin lizzies carrying men in the open, are almost comically antique and vulnerable; the I.R.A. rebels, who wear awkward long coats and caps as they scramble over a hill, look less like a guerrilla force than like fellows who had planned to go shopping with their families but somehow got sidetracked into a bizarre adventure. The movie’s power derives from what can only be called under-staging. When the Black and Tans storm into the yard of a Republican family, they line the young men up against a wall; the English soldiers are contemptuous of the Irish—they think they know these people, these troublemakers, and they treat them with coarse intimacy. Yet the brutality has an oddly spasmodic, unpatterned feeling: one soldier may be nearly insane with rage while the others stand around blank-faced, not sure how they should behave. The young Irish men are sullenly silent, too, as their mothers and sisters lunge distractedly toward them to protect them, then get shoved out of the way by the soldiers. Loach isn’t trying for gracefulness or even clarity; he’s trying for his own kind of scrappy truthfulness in which pent-up physical violence bursts out clumsily. Loach’s violence doesn’t have the stylized glamour of classic movie mayhem; it has the look of surprise.

Cillian Murphy, with his full lips and fine-boned face—he was the charming, sinister seducer in the neat little thriller “Red Eye” and the sweet cross-dresser in “Breakfast on Pluto”—might seem to be an odd choice for a revolutionary, but the point about Damien is that he’s a mild man who has been groomed for a refined life (as a London doctor), only to get dragged into war. Murphy is normally very quiet in movies; he has attained his mystique as an actor by staring at people with baby-blue eyes. In this film, too, he has, at times, a deep stillness, but he has idiosyncratic moments as well, such as when Damien has to execute a teen-ager who has ratted on the I.R.A. Murphy, writhing, shoots the boy and stumbles away, nausea struggling against duty. The rest of Loach’s actors, however, don’t engage the camera with their eyes, which is generally how performers bring attention to themselves in movies. Instead, heads down, they stick to the clandestine business at hand, delivering messages, arguing in late-night meetings, hurtling through barely lit corridors. It’s an exciting film, but Laverty and Loach demonstrate again and again that revolutionary violence, with its demand for internal discipline and purity, is inherently tragic. In the end, Damien can’t accept the Anglo-Irish compromise because he’s committed acts, such as killing the boy, that would become meaningless if he lessened the absoluteness of his goals. That he’s wrong, or that his brother is wrong to threaten him with execution, isn’t really the issue: the inexorability of the revolutionary process has caught both of them in its spiralling steel coils. Revising my statement of what “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” is about, I would say that it’s a sombrely beautiful dream of the violent Irish past. Refusing the standard flourishes of Irish wildness or lyricism, Loach has made a film for our moment, a time of bewildering internecine warfare.

The great film critic Manny Farber once praised what he called “termite art,” by which he meant the kind of small, stubborn movie that chews its way through a narrow piece of turf. David Fincher’s “Zodiac” is mollusk art: the movie keeps elaborating itself out of its own discharge, hardening its emotions, anxieties, and energies into a shell of obsession. Fincher, working with a fantastically detailed script by the young James Vanderbilt, chronicles the case of the self-identified Zodiac killer, a taunting, publicity-mad creep who murdered at least five people in the San Francisco Bay area in the late nineteen-sixties and sent confessional notes about the crimes (sometimes in code) to newspapers. Fincher puts two of the murders right near the beginning of the movie, both of them as sustained in their terror as anything he did in his notorious serial-killer movie, “Se7en” (1995), which featured deliquescing corpses. But then, astonishingly, “Zodiac” becomes not another thriller or horror show but a multifaceted procedural that divides its narrative attention between the Police Department, where two hardworking cops (Anthony Edwards and Mark Ruffalo) keep coming up with false leads, and the San Francisco Chronicle, where an ace crime reporter, Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.), and the newspaper’s cartoonist, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), who has a talent for puzzles, devote their lives to the search for the killer. Moving swiftly, but with precise attention to the emotional coloring of such things as weather and light and dour institutional spaces, Fincher runs through interrogations, trips to the library, the sorting and matching of mounds of evidence. Fincher has changed direction. The creator of the nutty, sub-fascist “Fight Club” and the dumb fright movie “Panic Room” has suddenly devoted himself to (of all things) manners and jurisdictional niceties—the way people talk to one another in a newspaper office, the hassles over evidence between the police of one city and those of another. He has discovered the everyday working world, and he’s fascinated by its moods and small tensions, its endless give-and-take.

“Zodiac” is superbly made, but it’s also a strange piece of work. As the bad tips and the dubious suspects pile up, one Zodiac investigator after another, devoured by the hunt or merely bored, leaves the case or retires. Only Graysmith, whose two books about Zodiac served as the basis for the picture, keeps going, but he brings his kids into the investigation and breaks up his marriage, and comes off as a selfish nut. As “Zodiac” goes on and on, and it becomes clear that no dénouement is possible (the crime was never solved), we have to ask what the reason for all this cinematic blind-alleying might be. Any honest neurotic could probably tell you: the emotional payoff of an obsession is not attaining some longed-for goal—it’s the obsession itself, which fulfills certain needs. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be an obsession. Graysmith, whom no one takes seriously at first, wants to prove himself as a sleuth, perhaps, but his real need is to be absorbed in the search. For Fincher, I would guess, the identity of the killer is less important than the vast effort of almost (but not quite) finding him. He teaches us—and we absorb the lesson uneasily—that truth, like some vision that recedes as we draw near it, will never quite yield to our most ardent pursuit. ♦