Calvary

I Sin On The Craic

Calvary
Ireland/UK 2014
Directed by John Michael McDonagh
Entertainment One Blu Ray Zone B

I’m not that familiar with the work of actor Brendan Gleeson, it has to be said but, after seeing him turn in a phenomenal performance in Hampstead last year (reviewed by me here), I thought it was high time I caught up with at least one other of his films and I knew the word of mouth on Twitter for Calvary when it was released a few years ago was pretty good.

And it is, to be fair, a pretty amazing film and although the title is a bit of a spoiler, perhaps, if you know what it actually means (I don’t remember it being explained in the film itself), it’s a film which maybe gives you a little bit of hope as to what the outcome, as inevitable as it seems, is going to be as the central character weaves a spell of magic and righteousness as he goes about his daily business.

So here we have Brendan Gleeson playing Father James, a man with a grown up daughter from a wife who has since died with James embracing religion and joining the priesthood as a result of this incident. The film starts with him in his confessional box and a man, known to James but whose identity is withheld from the audience until the final reveal at the denouement of the movie, explains to him how he was raped and regularly molested as a child by a catholic priest. The priest in question is long dead but the man says words to the effect that nobody takes any notice when a bad priest is killed. However, if a good priest is murdered then that’s something people will have to take notice of so he tells Father James that he will meet him in one week’s time on the beach, where he will kill him. He is giving him one week to put his house in order and prepare for death.

Yup. That’s the plot set up and the film follows the duties and journeys among a whole village full of, often quite hard to stomach, people as the week progresses, each day heralded on screen in white lettering as it begins. And, of course, as the week unfolds before your eyes and Father James’ daughter comes to stay with him, not knowing of the impending peril he may be in, you try to figure out just which of the people Father James visits in his duties to humanity is the person who has threatened to end his life at the end of seven days. It’s hard to tell, actually, because Gleeson’s performance is subtle and he’s not giving anything away that you would catch on the first viewing and the way the director deliberately distracts you in the case of one person is... maybe detectable but it’s easily forgotten as the telling of the tale unfolds and so, I have to say, I was as surprised by the final reveal in the movie as anyone.

The casting is great here too. Gleeson is unbelievably brilliant and he’s ably backed up by people like Chris O’Dowd as the local butcher, M. Emmet Walsh as a very old writer (it took a few scenes for me to recognise this star of Blade Runner, reviewed here, in this), Dylan Moran in a stereotypical role (which I almost wish he’d stop accepting so he can go off and do a wider variety of parts) and a whole host of other, brilliant little character actors which includes an outstanding performance from Kelly Reilly as Father James’ daughter. Actually, she’s got red hair in this one and it’s the first time I’ve noticed how uncannily like a young, 1960s incarnation of Cilla Black she is (from her Work Is A Four Letter Word period).

Of course, the real star here, in a way, is the cinematography and the compositions in which the director renders his film. It’s absolutely beautiful to look at, executed with a very languid pacing which allows you to appreciate the bright colours and the dark contrasts of the surrounding landscape. This includes some unusual introductions into shots too. Like, for instance, the moment where Father James’ daughter finds him fishing. Instead of starting the sequence with an establishing shot filling the frame, we instead take a voyage with Kelly Reilly’s bare feet as she walks through the earth to him (without us even knowing whose feet we are following) before the edit takes us to the  shot that most director’s would have started the scene off with... it’s nice stuff.

Actually, it wasn’t until a scene where Gleeson is talking and praying with a French woman in church that I began to notice just what kind of modus operandi McDonagh was employing throughout the picture. The lady in question has just survived a horrendous car accident which killed her husband and as the two of them are talking, seated side by side in the very dark church, all you can see are the two upright panels of stained glass windows lit up behind them and the light on the front of their faces, in close up contrast to those windows. When we go to a more close up of Gleeson, it becomes evident, for example, that the heads and shoulders of those characters are only lit at the boundaries of the frame of those windows and carry the shape on down the screen... so there is hardly any light on them where the darkness on the left and right of those framed rectangles go.

Once I’d spotted what he was doing here, I soon discovered that the director starts using both the natural landscape and the interior environments as things which can be filled in or be in contrast to the shapes made by the way their surroundings are lit. People filling in for the parts of the environment that you can’t see, in other words. Such as that same woman’s head standing in for an invisible central strut to a big set of windows at an airport. The whole movie, once I’d noticed what was going on, seemed to me to be built out of vertical lines, upright blocks, various framing devices and, often, half lit faces. And, of course, it’s all the richer for it.

The film has a much more naturalistic acting style to contrast against the quite overtly rigid and controlling compositions which imprison the characters in the narrative space and I’ve already talked about what a grand job all the performers in the film do. What this approach to the acting also does is to usher in the final ‘showdown’ between the priest and one of his ‘customers’ in the parish almost by stealth. There are logical expectations as to where the film is going and the ‘week in the life’ approach to the central character and his attitude to life and others kind of lulls you into a certain attitude adjustment as to where the film is headed before it gets there. I’m not saying the end of the film is a total surprise but I really don’t want to discuss the scene which everything is leading up to here because it’s a huge spoiler.

However, I will ask you to take note of what Father James tells his daughter is the ‘most over-rated virtue’ towards the end of the film and to maybe look at the final few shots of the movie, after the ‘showdown’ has occurred and maybe find some kind of final word on where the characters are heading just before the credits roll. That being said, there is a certain amount of ambiguity in the final scene too but, as I said, I think the discussion about virtue may be a way into a sense of closure for the film (or it was for me, at any rate). As the credits play out, stick around if you want to see a few location shots scattered here and there which may, or may not, add comment to the consequences of the events of the movie as it plays out.

And that’s me on Calvary. A mind blowing film which I would absolutely recommend to pretty much anyone who asks me about it. If you have a love of cinema and the places and mindsets where it can transport you and, especially in this case, the way in which it can inspire thought about the tunnel vision of different people to deal with specific problems and the consequences they have for everybody else, then you really should add this one to your list. And that’s all I’m saying about it here.