How Harry Became a Tree


How Harry Became a Tree is a 2001 drama film directed by Goran Paskaljević and starring Colm Meaney, Adrian Dunbar and Cillian Murphy. It is based on a Chinese story Lao Dan by Yang Zhengguang and deals allegorically with the Irish and Balkan civil wars.

Plot

In rural Ireland in 1924, Harry Maloney, believing "a man is measured by his enemies", nurses an unjustified enmity for George O'Flaherty, who owns the local pub and most of the businesses in the area and is the local matchmaker. When Harry's son Gus, upon whom Harry regularly heaps mental and verbal abuse falls for George's maidservant, Eileen, George helps put the two together. George's seduction of Eileen gives Harry the opportunity to create a scandal, despite the effect on his own family.

Cast

Reviewing the film in Hot Press, Craig Fitzsimons wrote "though flawed, How Harry Became A Tree would probably qualify as the most effective example of homegrown bucolic melodrama since Neil Jordan's The [Butcher Boy |The Butcher Boy] adaptation".
The [New York Times] wrote that it was "a comic and improbably loving meditation on hate, absurdist but never abstract, using Ireland in 1924 as a stand-in for the former Yugoslavia."