Calvary

Even though I didn't write about any movies here last year, I did see several--54 to be precise, in theaters or on DVD, counting only current and recent films, not classic films of which I saw about 150. I'll try to spend the next few posts catching up some of those films, starting with the last few I saw in 2014. In Calvary, an priest (Brendan Gleeson) in a small Irish village is visited in the confessional by a man who was sexually molested in his youth by a priest (The first of the line is his: "I first tasted semen when I was seven years old."). The molester has died but the man can't find peace so he tells Gleeson that he will murder the priest next Sunday, on the beach. He says he knows Gleeson is a good man, but that will make his death all the more cleansing.

Gleeson knows who the man is but takes no substantive action. Instead he goes about his week like normal and we see his day-today interactions with his troubled flock. In some ways, the movie plays out almost like the basis for a TV show about the trial and tribulations of a modern-day priest. This is not "Going My Way" territory; Gleeson was married and had a daughter before his wife died and he took Holy Orders, so he is worldly, and he is flawed--at one point in a fit of anger, he wrecks havoc in a bar. Director John Michael McDonagh has said his film was inspired by Robert Bresson's austere film Diary of a Country Priest, and both follow a priest through everyday events as he manages to keep faith in the face of the flawed secular world in which he lives and ministers.

As a lapsed Catholic, I have to say that neither film made me see why such faith should be sustained, but as character studies, they are both good films. Gleeson is excellent as a very human priest, and he is surrounded by a solid supporting cast including Chris O'Dowd as a possible wife-beater, M. Emmet Walsh (pictured above with Gleeson) as a dying American writer, Aidan Gillen (Littlefinger in Game of Thrones, pictured below) as a doctor, and Dylan Moran as a rich man who delights in being a son-of-a-bitch to everyone. The tone of the film is serious though not really dark, with comic shadings, and the ending is a little surprising but satisfying. In an age of big-budget action and fantasy films, I feel hopeful that there is still room for something small, serious and semi-artsy at the multiplexes.