John Michael McDonagh (2014)

Calvary has a brilliant opening sequence.  Father James Lavelle hears in the confessional the voice of a man who describes the abuse that he suffered as a child at the hands of a Catholic priest.   Fr James admits that he doesn’t know what to say in response, beyond asking if the man has sought and received counselling, made a formal complaint etc.  The voice thinks that would be pointless and not only because the offender is dead now:  what’s the good anyway of revenge on a bad priest?  But a good priest, like Fr James, is a different matter – revenge on a good priest would mean more.  ‘I’m going to kill you, Father,’ the voice explains, ‘because you’ve done nothing wrong’.  The appointment with death is set for the following Sunday.  During this conversation, there has been only one face on screen, that of Brendan Gleeson, who plays Fr James.  He seeks advice from his bishop (David McSavage), saying that he knows the identity of the visitor to the confessional booth.  Since the man didn’t seek absolution for the sin he announced his intention to commit, the bishop’s view is that Fr James isn’t bound by the priest-penitent privilege that normally governs confession – that he would be entitled to report the matter to the police if he chose to do so.  The bishop stresses, though, that it’s Fr James’s choice.   Fr James goes not to the police but to meet his nemesis in due course – on a nearby beach, as agreed – and his death, with a bullet through the head.

In spite of the title, the words of St Augustine that appear on the screen at the start of Calvary (‘Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned’) and the film’s release in Britain to coincide with Holy Week, the parallels with the Easter story aren’t at all laboured.  (It was striking to see Calvary the day after watching this week’s episode of Rev on television.  Adam Smallbone, mired in scandal, literally carries a heavy cross on a Hackney via dolorosa.  The vagrant Colin denies knowing him just before a burglar alarm goes off on a nearby KFC-type joint with a cockerel logo.  Do the people responsible for Rev think that because it’s unhappy and mostly unfunny it must have depth too?)  John Michael McDonagh divides the narrative of Calvary into daily chapters between the threat in the confessional and Fr James’s murder but I didn’t pick up other suggestions that the events were happening in the run-up to Easter.  Even so, the paschal flavouring makes you notice that the priest dies on a Sunday morning rather than the preceding Friday.

After that opening, which you can’t get out of your head, McDonagh introduces Fr James’s parishioners in the small country town in County Sligo where the film is set.  I worried for a while that Calvary might be marking time before returning to the heart of the matter but not at all.  The oppressive malignancy and/or bad behaviour of the locals, their various forms of hostility towards the priest, experiences that cause him to question his Christian beliefs – these make for a powerful and relentless combination.  A tourist dies in a car accident.  The young serial killer (Domhnall Gleeson) whom Fr James visits in prison asks the priest to confirm that God created him.  By the time Sunday approaches, you’ve become so absorbed by the travails of the priest’s life that the thought of the death threat against him is, rather than the dominant element, something that keeps returning to shock you.

The locals, even if they’re not black-hearted, are a spiritual challenge to Fr James.  An acerbic atheist doctor (Aidan Gillen) taunts the priest when he arrives at the local hospital to deliver the last rites for the unfortunate tourist.  (Dr Harte is first seen among the line-up of those attending mass – a hint that he’s prepared to taunt at all costs.)   The feckless butcher (Chris O’Dowd) isn’t sure if his wife (Orla O’Rourke), a kind of masochistic vamp, is bipolar or lactose-intolerant; in any case, he doesn’t think it’s anything to do with him if her latest boyfriend, an Ivorian car mechanic (Isaach de Bankolé), is beating her up.   The publican (Pat Shortt), allegedly (and improbably) Buddhist, sounds as nasty as he looks.  The greatly wealthy, spiritually bankrupt financier (Dylan Moran), who supposedly owns Holbein’s The Ambassadors (the original is actually in the National Gallery), pisses on it to show Fr James what he’s capable of.   A wily American writer resident in the place (M Emmet Walsh) is at death’s door and wants to decide when he goes through it.  He asks Fr James to get him a gun, the supplier of which is an ex-police detective (Gary Lydon), who’s shacked up with hyperkinetic Leo (Owen Sharpe):  Leo keeps stressing his sexual availability in faux-American hardboiled crime fiction locutions.  There’s a dim lad called Milo (Killian Scott) who, sexually frustrated and having nearly exhausted the possibilities of fulfilment through pornography, seeks Fr James’s advice about joining the army to make professional use of his homicidal feelings.  The main cast is completed by Fr James’s fellow priest, Father Timothy Leary (David Wilmot); the cheeky altar boy Micheal, who also draws seascapes at what will be the scene of the culminating crime (Michael Og Lane – with his amazing, premature old man’s face although, as in The Guard, he’s isn’t so good at reading lines); and two significant women characters, who complicate and enrich Calvary.  The first is Teresa (Marie-Josée Croze), the widow of the car crash fatality and a Catholic whose dignified acceptance of her husband’s death impresses Fr James.  He sees Teresa again at the airport when he’s decided, on the Saturday morning, to leave town; meeting her and looking at her husband’s coffin ready for loading on the plane sends him back to meet his own fate.  The other woman is Fiona (Kelly Reilly), who visits the priest for a few days, following her latest attempt at self-harming.   She is Fr James’s daughter.

The priest’s unusual backstory is effective in several ways.  It makes him more suspicious in the minds of some of the locals.  (When he explains in the pub that he was married but his wife died, then he joined the priesthood, Milo asks, ‘Is that possible?’ and Dr Harte drily replies, ‘It would appear so’.)  Rightly or wrongly, his heterosexual achievements will also give Fr James some distance, in the minds of many viewers, from the paedophile priests for whose sins he is the scapegoat.  That he decided, in middle age, to enter the priesthood both reinforces his sense of vocation and is the cause of an unresolved tension between him and Fiona.  (She sometimes addresses him as ‘Father’ with knowing irony.)  Fr James is a seriously conceived and admirably written character:  it’s to the credit of both John Michael McDonagh and Brendan Gleeson that you wouldn’t know from Calvary their personal views about the Catholic Church or, more largely, whether either has any religious belief.  Fr James isn’t given long monologues defending his faith but you’re never in doubt that faith is real, and McDonagh does allow him a few simple but potent rejoinders.  (When the serial killer gets pretentious and says that, at the moment of murdering his young female victims, ‘you become God’, Fr James replies with deeply felt derision, ‘No, you don’t … you don’t’.)  McDonagh has said that he decided to write this screenplay because he expected there to be plenty of other films made about the Catholic Church abuse scandals:  he wanted to tackle the subject in his way, sooner rather than later.  It’s fair enough to describe Calvary as a ‘black comedy’ but McDonagh has been at pains to stress its seriousness and it could be argued the comedy is almost entirely in the caustic verbal wit which this writer-director uses with such facility.

Brendan Gleeson is the ideal actor to play Fr James.  Gleeson naturally suggests intelligence and his core of humour means the man he creates is never constricted by solemnity even if he has a great deal to be solemn about.  There’s not a hint of commentary on the priest in Gleeson’s playing of him – he is completely empathetic.  You fear at once for the priest’s golden retriever and are right to do so.  Gleeson makes the relationship with the dog moving; unconstrained by his priestly duties, Fr James can express love for the animal (burying his head in its fur in one scene) and pain at its death quite freely.  Gleeson’s formidable bulk is important too:  he makes Fr James into a man in all senses hard to break down (so that his eventual death is all the more appalling).   The actor’s physical impact in this role stands comparison with that of Max von Sydow in The Virgin Spring.  Gleeson and McDonagh have both said that the parishioners, although they want to throw everything they can at Fr James to test him, also want him to withstand it all – to be able to reassure them in a way that priests can no longer do, not least because they’re figures of suspicion now.  In one crucial, piercing scene, Fr James strikes up a conversation with a young girl (Anabel Sweeney).  The conversation is violently interrupted when her father’s car screeches into the frame and the driver (Declan Conlon) yells at the child to get in and at the priest for daring to speak to her.  The supporting performances are inevitably limited in comparison with Gleeson’s and not all the characters are up to much.  (The joke name for the other priest may be a tacit admission on McDonagh’s part that the craven Fr Leary isn’t much more than a hand-me-down from Father Ted.)  But Calvary is, for the most part, well cast and vividly played.

While the child abuse scandals are central to the story, McDonagh uses these – and other well-known features of contemporary Irish life, such as the vagaries of the country’s economy – as a moral setting rather than a message, a counterpoint to the beauty and grandeur of the physical terrain.  There’s also a dichotomy between the scale of the landscape and the essential meanness of many of the human concerns and motivations in evidence.  Even though McDonagh has assembled a kind of rogues’ gallery, a collection of artfully differentiated points of view, the inexorable momentum and power of the story make the locals scarily cohesive – a community of ill will in opposition to the good priest.  Fr James’s church is built of wood and painted sky blue:  as naïve as it’s vulnerable, the church is burned down midway through the week.  This doesn’t make complete sense in the scheme of the story:  it’s not as if the voice in the confessional was threatening the priest with death unless he took care to avoid it – he stated simply that he would kill Fr James so the ‘warning’ of the church’s destruction feels redundant, even if the burning building makes for a fine image.   (The cinematography is by Larry Smith.)   A moment more in keeping with Calvary’s blend of tragedy and unaccountable humour occurs when Fr James is driving out of town towards the airport.  Roger Whittaker’s ‘New World in the Morning’ is on the soundtrack – this is a powerful song and the effect is deeply sad.  Then Milo draws alongside on his motor bike and brings Fr James and viewers (like me) back to earth.

I could have done without Fr James being an ex-alcoholic (with the inevitable reversion).  As in The Guard, there are times when McDonagh himself succumbs to the temptation of showing off his literacy.  It’s funny when the priest criticises the linguistic inadequacies of his tormentors:  Leo rattles on about being fucked by everyone ‘from the hoi polloi to the masses’ and the priest explains wearily that the two are the same thing (he doesn’t mention that hoi polloi doesn’t need an article either).  But in the confrontation on the beach – when Fr James is asked by his killer-to-be if he has any regrets, replies that he never finished Moby Dick and has his his assailant explain how it ends – this smart-aleck flourish merely slows things down (and doesn’t fit with the character of the gunman, who wouldn’t have had the stamina to get through the novel).   Calvary never ceases to be an extraordinary prospective whodunnit but the identity of the man with murder in mind becomes almost secondary – until the murder happens, that is.  (Except for the Melville diversion, this is grippingly staged.)  Something goes wrong at the very end:  in the montage of snapshots of the other characters’ lives after Fr James’s death and particularly when Fiona visits his killer in prison.   (She was told by her father, shortly before he died, that, among the virtues, he thinks forgiveness has been ‘highly underrated’.)  McDonagh does well not to retreat into irony at this stage but what he comes up with instead is too conventional.  It’s about the only thing about Calvary that is, though.  McDonagh, when he set to work, clearly had distinguished priest-in-torment screen predecessors – Diary of a Country Priest, I Confess, Winter Light – in mind.  But he’s made an original and impressive film.

22 April 2014