When even a very Irish friend from Limerick takes The Wind That Shakes the Barley to task for raking embers best left alone, I can’t help wondering why trained lawyer and socialist-oriented Brit-basher and former London TV director Ken Loach turned this way to Ireland immediately after the Great War.

Loach’s ill-considered effort may be directed to the Irish contingent in this country, eager to swallow at a comfortable distance the romantic claptrap purveyed about Tommy Clancy’s “land of happy warriors and sad love songs.” Perhaps, “work[ed] in the closest of collaborations with Ken,” the Paul Laverty screenplay aims back at Cannes branding of agitprop Hidden Agenda as “the ‘IRA’ entry to the festival.” Although both men bandy about “acute memory [and] collective conscious” in the West Cork filming location, and Loach pontificates about clarifying public understanding of this patch of history, the result leaves one still in the dark about the complex origins of The Troubles. Although characters stop action to lecture at several static moments, or even read directly from broadsheets or newsreel titles, all that emerges is a hodgepodge of interests as overt Imperial domination uneasily gives place to economic class domination. Nothing new there.

Many would quarrel with William Butler Yeats’s surprising “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,” for Eire has managed to maintain its aura of storytelling and strong voluble manhood. But apart from failure in the area of facts, the film descends to more Old Sod cinecliché than Titanic’s belowdecks and resorts to forced parallels and nonsense like found lost notes, so that, badly illuminated -- for rainy weather ----the plotline grows weary after a nice introductory hurling match.

The conceit of brothers, or its variation in boyhood best buddies, who wind up on opposite sides of political or legal fences, is a familiar warhorse. It takes a while to work to the foreground here, but that’s the individual human conflict on which the larger group struggle is threaded.

A medical student soon to depart for plum hospital training in England, orphan Damien O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy) is appalled by the four-letter overkill of occupying troops towards property, old people, men and women -- a hair-shearing episode standing in for graphic rape -- and is drawn into the ragtag ranks of freedom fighters so ill-fitted out that they use hurley sticks before taking firearms from dead soldiers.

Damien finds a kindred soul in articulate ex-railroad man Dan (Liam Cunningham), educated late but sensitive to the real oppression of the poor by landholders like Sir John Hamilton (Roger Allah) and politicians and capitalists on both sides of the Irish Sea. Even given a couple spurious seconds doctoring a dying child in an obligatory stone cottage, Damien’s skills are made nothing of by the plot but are supposedly intended to conjure sympathy when this man pledged to save lives must coldly shoot pathetic traitor Chris Reilly (John Crean) in the heart. Because Chris’s mom (Orla Fitzgerald) is illiterate, the condemned young man cannot write the customary letter to that woman who will disdain to see his executioner’s face ever again.

Older brother Teddy (Pádraic Delaney), seminary educated, is courageous and ruthless but more of a leader in the terrible years following the 1916 Easter Rising. Also less than perceptive about sociopolitical realities, he trades in IRA flying column guerrilla gear for Free State uniform to enforce the humiliating partition and status quo economic oppression of the Home Rule bill of 1920 and subsequent Treaty.

In case audiences are befuddled by rhetoric as new alliances form, the brothers conspicuously sit on opposite sides of the nave while the pulpit endorses the Church-supported settlement-betrayal, and after sharp words following services, the outcome hobbles to an inevitable reprise of better films.

Whatever its professed purposes, The Wind That Shakes the Barley seems more personal spleen than anything else. Neither elucidating nor entertaining, it is no more than inept beating of a horse that should be long dead. 

(Released by IFC First Take; not rated by MPAA.)