Ireland may have gotten through the worst of its share of the fallout from contemporary economic turbulence, but the subsequent work of closure and catharsis is only beginning. Calvary is a piece of that work.
Calvary is the 2nd feature film directed by Mr. McDonagh, after The Guard (2011), an entertaining comedy cop movie that, like Calvary, features Brendan Gleeson in the title role and, also like Calvary, is about an unorthodox authority figure in an uncommon situation in contemporary Ireland.
Calvary aims much higher than The Guard, and it (almost) succeeds. It tells the story of a priest who hears the confession of a former victim of sexual molestation from another priest. The victim has decided to take revenge, not on the molester, who is already dead, but in someone completely innocent and righteous, for good measure of the despondency the victim feels the need to express: especifically, the priest hearing the confession himself, who shall be murdered the following Sunday. What ensues is not, as might be expected, a race-against-time thriller to search the purported criminal and prevent the crime, but a day-by-day account of the comings and goings of Father James (Gleeson) about his parish, as he ponders what course of action to pursue: can he go to the police, since the threat he suffered was made during confession?
Calvary was co-produced by the Irish Film Board, and The MacMahonian would like to see written evidence that it wasn´t in cahoots with the Irish Tourist Board. I mean, everybody knows that Ireland is pretty, but this is ridiculous: Calvary makes John Ford´s The Quiet Man (1956) look like suburban Houston rush hour on YouTube. It looks like County Sligo, where the action takes place, virtually bypassed world History since the 2nd industrial revolution. Nary a sequence or conversation in Calvary takes place that doesn´t have as background a quaint and perfectly preserved rustic cottage interior, a medieval castle tower in ruins, a grey stone manor house, a field of green abruptly ending in a chalky cliff under leaden cloudy skies overlooking vast mutinous wavy seascapes. And all simply pour faire joli. Unless of course it is to counterpoint Father James´s flock, black sheep to the last, whose only goal in life seems to be to affront by word and deed the Father´s faith. There´s the local woman of loose morals, the local nihilist nouveau riche and, my favourite, the local gay male prostitute, who incongruously but entertainingly speaks in a sort of 30s Warner Bros gangster film gangster snarl, apparently to suggest that child abuse has made him, too, like he is, twisted and cynical, apparently indicating that catholic morality makes it mandatory to portray your garden variety gay male prostitute as being visibly more traumatized and tortured than your garden variety cab driver or bricklayer.
It maybe that, like people who go out shopping sometimes feel frustrated if they return home without having spent any money, so do armchair film critics fear dereliction of duty if they don´t find fault in works generally praised. Be that as may, The MacMahonian can´t quite bring itself to join the fanfare of accolades that have met Calvary, in light of the foregoing and also of the lame (even if explicitly assumed) occasional attempts at emulating bressonian pathos, last sequence excluded. But Calvary is effective as a whodunit (or, in this case, whosgonnadoit), has great dialogue (after all, it´s Irish), more than its fair share of surprising plot twists, none of which gratuitous, and some appropriately embedded, if maybe sometimes too florid, sharp remarks about contemporary Ireland. And it does have the best movie line of the year so far: suspected girlfriend beater to priest: “She´s bipolar, Father (pause). That or lactose intolerant, one of the two”.