IN THE LAND OF SAINTS AND SINNERS is a melancholy study of the futility of violence. Set in the war-torn Northern Ireland of 1974, it features a performance by Liam Neeson that is considered, measured, and infinitely eloquent for its silences in a story that eschews politics as it finely observes the consequences of choices, good and bad.
Neeson is Finbar Murphy, a war veteran and hitman based in a rural village in Donegal. The latter experience left him hollow inside, as did the death of his beloved wife while he was away. Hollow, but not bereft of feeling, an irony considering his profession and that his best friend, Vincent O’Shea (Ciarán Hinds) is the local Garda. The irony will come to a head when carrying out his latest assignment. Far from trying to plead for his life, the victim becomes philosophical in his last minute on earth, accepting that his life’s choices have led him to this, and suggesting that Finbar might consider changing his life before he, too, finds himself on the wrong side of a gun.
The conversation sticks with him, gradually changing his paradigm of carefully cultivated emotional isolation. He finally accepts a dinner invitation from the neighbor (Niamh Cusack) with whom he has been genially flirting, and resigning from his job, to the bemusement of his boss (Colm Meaney), who is left with only a hot-headed and very angry young man (Jack Gleeson) to carry out the hits. Just as his life might find some peace, the outside world invades the peacefulness of his small town in the person of three fugitives on the run after blowing up a building in Belfast, and accidentally killing some children who happened to stop in front of it at the wrong time.
As the counterpoint to Neeson’s Finbar, there is Doireann McCann (Kerry Condon), the banshee ringleader of those bombers and the reason they are on the run after an impulsive act of compassion tipped the police to their identity. It is a more methodically thought-out decision on Finbar’s part, also one of a twisted compassion, that will throw them together in a struggle that can only end in more bloodshed and death.
Neeson finds the cognitive disconnect that allows Finbar to nurture a cat who remains aloof, threaten Kevin with death if he continues to mock his victims, and trade good-natured insults with Vincent whether in shooting competitions or commiserating with Vincent’s wife at the local pub about what a bad lot she has. He is both good and bad, but Neeson does not make that duality mutually exclusive. He makes it the human condition and almost its original sin.
By setting this film in a close-knit village, writers Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane bring into clear focus the toll of putting politics above human life. And the necessity of human connections to put that in question. In the person of Doireann, Condon is ferocious; the is perfect metaphor for the results of generational violence that can think only in those terms. It is the mindset, and legacy, that continues the violence instead of obtaining her stated objective of freeing Ireland. Indeed, she reminds everyone she threatens about what she is fighting for, tragically blind to what she is actually accomplishing. This character is a monster, but what she has become is heartbreaking. And she will haunt your nightmares.
IN THE LAND OF SAINTS AND SINNERS builds to a climax that is explosive on every level. Time grows short, options evaporate, and, in a stroke of genius, it brings everything down to a personal relationship that has no room for the politics of destruction, even as it can do nothing to stop them.
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