Djembe - Concordia College

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fighting to bring back hope and create a new life, a journey that suggests universal and specific
connections. Into the West focuses on the Reilly family, Travelers who have relocated to urban
housing near Dublin airport following the death seven years earlier of Papa’s wife in childbirth that
resulted in young Ossie. The difficulty of dealing with death and learning how to live sends Ossie
(Ciarán Fitzgerald) and his older brother, Tito (Rúaidhrí Conroy), on a heroic journey. Philosopher
Thomas Attig, an internationally recognized expert on death, dying and bereavement, emphasizes
the difficulty involved: “Ordinarily, grieving involves nothing less complicated than relearning
the world, including our physical and social surroundings, our place in the greater scheme of
things, our selves, and our relationship with the one who has died” (7). When we consider how the
children experience death and seek resurrection, the heroic purpose of the film becomes clear: the
construction of identity as the children embrace the journey to self-responsibility and assurance,
and the boon of helping heal their grieving parental figures.
Ordinarily, when children experience the death of someone close to them, surviving
parental figures are expected to help the children understand and cope. However, Papa Murphy is
incapable of helping the children since he cannot cope with the death himself, but instead represses
his painful memories and stumbles through life in a haze. Attig’s description of bereavement
reflects exactly Papa’s experience:
When we are bereaved, we suffer a shattering loss of wholeness. The patterns of
connections to things, places, other people, experiences, activities, and projects in
our daily lives are in tatters. Our individual, family, and community life histories
are disrupted and cannot follow the courses we expected them to follow had our
loved one lived. Line of connection to larger wholes and our sense of place in
the larger scheme of things within which we find and make meaning are broken,
undermined, or threatened. We feel undone, at a loss as to how to go on, anxious,
insecure, unsafe, vulnerable. (10)
Papa can no longer live as a Traveler and lead his former community in the way of
life that he had shared with his dead wife. He retreats to the urban decay of government housing
where he can bring up his two boys with at least some government support, the very kind of
support denied to his wife when they were turned away from the hospital. Yet he is lost in this
environment, a broken man who cannot find his way, much less make a way for his children.
While Papa Reilly is prompting the children to scam the government man who has come to check
on the large Murphy family, a family in dire need of assistance, the seriousness of what he says
underlies the comedic scene: “I’m not your father. You understand me. The other man is your
father” (Newell). Indeed, he isn’t behaving as the father or man he once was. While Ossie does
not understand the comment on either level, having never known his father prior to his mother’s
death at his own birth, his elder brother Tito knows only too well that the man he lives with now
is not the father he once knew. Grandpa Ward (David Kelly) tells Papa, “You’re a fallen man.” He
insists that he come back to the West, to the Old Ways, to which Papa responds “The old ways is
dead.” The singular might be understood as a natural reflex of his class and lack of education, or it
might also be directly connected to Papa’s understanding that the old way of life died when Mary
died, that she and the Traveler way are one. He heads for the bar, turning his back on Grandpa and
any hint of that old life that the old man carries.
From the beginning, the theme of journey is visually created through a central symbol
that metaphorically will gain power across the arc of the narrative. Into the West opens on a clear,
dark night on the pristine sands of Dog Bay in Connemara, a lone, wild, white horse galloping
across the surf. The midnight blue of the sky and sea and the gleaming white horse is stunning,
with an extreme close-up on the horse’s eye giving us a sense of wild mystery, of being held in