“Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved.
Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.”Saint Augustine
So begins CALVARY, see if it doesn’t, John Michael McDonagh’s follow up film to his highly regarded THE GUARD. The pivotal person in the previous picture was a policeman played by Brendan Gleeson while in CALVARY the same actor trades tunic for cassock to portray a priest.
In a startling opening scene within the confines of the confessional, the potential penitent rails against the pedophilia so prevalent within the priesthood and his wish to waste a cleric.
But killing a corrupt clergy would not have the same impact as killing an innocent one, he reasons, so he has decided to kill his confessor some seven days hence.
And so begins the countdown on what could be the priests last days on earth and the customary parading of the suspects plotting the assassination. There’s no lack of likely life takers in this parish with more than a modicum of motive for murder.
Among the parishioners whose passions run high against the priest, not personally but the institution he represents, is a surgeon who cannot reconcile the slaughter of innocents allowed by a God of mercy and love.
There’s a woman wedded to an abusive husband but in the eyes of the church she has made her bed and she must lie in it. If so, she reasons, she will lie in that bed with whoever she pleases.
One who she pleases is a motor mechanic who harbours a contempt for the church and its patronising missionary position a remnant of colonial piccaninny paternalism and subjugation.
The title, CALVARY, comes from that place where the Christ, according to scripture, paid for the sins of others. It was a death foretold, and therefore a glorified suicide, muses one of the characters, a sly apostasy that would have had him stoned not so long ago .
The plucky padre is not some sanctimonious proselyte much more a fully human, caring, thoughtful man. Before he took the cloth, he was a married man, widowed, wallowed in alcoholic self pity, neglectful of his daughter.
A compassionate bible black humour redemption, reconciliation, set in Easkey, County Sligo, this knock out movie seeks not to know all the answers but to understand the questions.
Aidan Gillen as the Dr. Frank Harte, his nomenclature charged with symbolism, is a powder keg of seething disgust for the deity
Comedians Chris O’Dowd and Dylan Moran play the butcher and the disillusioned, dissolute and often drunk local land baron, playing against type and all the more powerful for it.
Isaach De Bankole and Orla O’Rourke play the adulterous couple, a black man and a woman flaunting their contempt for a church that has a desultory and discriminatory history against both.
Among the priest’s allies are his daughter, beautifully played by Kelly Reilly, M. Emmett Walsh as a reclusive author, and Marie Josee Croze as a French tourist who, literally by devastating accident, comes into his sacramental sphere.
Written and directed with an unerring eloquence by John Michael McDonagh, luminously lensed by Larry Smith, boasting a bold central performance from Brendan Gleeson and a splendid supporting cast, CALVARY is a startling, sardonic and sometimes shocking interpretation of the stations of the cross, and a plea for less talk about sin and more about virtue, less action about damnation and more about forgiveness.