When Pádraic Súilleabháin despairs, he seeks solace in the company of his pet miniature donkey.
ádraic lives on a small island off the coast of Ireland. It is the 1920s, so emotional-support animals aren’t yet a concept. But if they were, Jenny the donkey would qualify.
Pádraic needs Jenny because he has just been dumped by his best friend, Colm Doherty. Jenny would never betray Pádraic like that.
She wouldn’t consider him too “dull” to spend time with. Silent but steadfast in her support, Jenny is one of the most endearing characters in The Banshees of Inisherin, Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-nominated tragi-comedy about the fracturing of the friendship between Pádraic ( Colin Farrell) and Colm ( Brendan Gleeson). But the animal gets caught up in the escalating feud.
Jenny’s story is one of three grim donkey tales to figure in this year’s Oscar movies, between Best Picture contenders Banshees and Triangle of Sadness, and the Polish entry for Best International Feature, Eo. Each animal leads an anguished life, with human cruelty as the central thread.
The filmmakers question what our harsh treatment of these beasts says about us. Hint: It’s not flattering.
Listen to the harrowing brays of the donkey in Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness, a satire in which the obnoxious, self-serving guests of a luxury cruise end up stranded on a desert island. The wild animal is savagely killed off-camera by humans starved of meat – a disturbing occurrence that may have been more forgivable, given the circumstances, had some of the castaways not celebrated the violence.
Spot the same shameless glee throughout Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo, a modern-day fable following the titular donkey through Poland and Italy.
Eo begins his nomadic travels after getting separated from his caretaker at a circus. He is picked up by a rowdy soccer team and then brutalised by its rivals, then rescued by veterinarians who heal him before he is stolen and shuffled into a mysterious truck.
Eo’s luck fluctuates. He is the lens through which we interrogate humanity’s best and worst impulses.
Poor thing. Skolimowski shoots from Eo’s perspective in a few of his most brutal moments and closes in on his adorable eyes in others, building a sense of pathos. A unique form of sorrow underlies the hardship of these on-screen donkeys, for the most part bred to carry the burdens of another species. There’s something to the wordlessness of their pain and the mystery of its depth.
In Banshees, Jenny is endlessly loyal to Pádraic, as he is to her. He allows her into the family home as he sulks, and defends her presence to his sister: “I am not putting my donkey outside when I am sad, OK?” he says. Jenny’s company is worth having to scoop her poop off the kitchen floor. What a pity such a treasured creature meets a tragic end, collateral damage in the perverse conflict between Colm and Padraic.
Oh, Jenny. Sweet Jenny! Felled by the pride of stubborn men.
