Cal­vary

The bat­tle between fer­vent reli­gios­i­ty and intense, com­mon-sense athe­ism rages in a small Coun­ty Sli­go coastal vil­lage as the local priest (Bren­dan Gleeson’s Father James) is polite­ly informed — in the con­fes­sion box, no less — that he has sev­en days to live. Like an elon­gat­ed episode of Father Ted with the intel­lec­tu­al rigour of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Coun­try Priest, direc­tor John Michael McDonagh’s extra­or­di­nary film presents deep exis­ten­tial tor­ment under the guise of a parochial mur­der mystery.

The audi­ence are not shown the face of the mur­der­er-in-wait­ing, but this is noth­ing more than a nar­ra­tive red her­ring. McDon­agh has no inter­est in cul­ti­vat­ing a super­fi­cial mys­tery, instead employ­ing this sit­u­a­tion as a plat­form to explore the meta­phys­i­cal conun­drums of life in the mod­ern priest­hood and in turn cre­at­ing a noir-tinged Celtic west­ern of incred­i­ble sub­stance, rich nuance and height­ened drama.

McDonagh’s writ­ing and direc­tion here are exem­plary, as each of the eccen­tric side play­ers — some poten­tial mur­der sus­pects — emerges as round­ed, unpre­dictable, mem­o­rable and humane. They also rep­re­sent some of the tough­est chal­lenges to the tenets of Catholi­cism today, from sex­u­al root­less­ness and ingrained racism through to the moral­i­ty of war and the con­so­la­tions of money.

There’s even a mir­a­cle, too, in the form of Gleeson’s mon­u­men­tal cen­tral per­for­mance. His hap­less holy­man, refus­ing to let his appar­ent­ly inevitable demise dent his unerr­ing duty to the com­pas­sion­ate life, recalls the unsmil­ing melan­choly and griz­zled world-weari­ness of Robert Mitchum in The Friends of Eddie Coyle. His strange accep­tance of his fate even sig­nals a ded­i­ca­tion to faith that per­haps tran­scends the phys­i­cal world. Or could it pos­si­bly be a man final­ly being off ered the prospect of sweet relief?

Among the numer­ous knock-out two-han­der scenes, the film’s great­est tri­umph is a sub-plot involv­ing James and his semi-estranged/­sui­ci­dal­ly depressed daugh­ter played by Kel­ly Reil­ly. The gru­elling details of her sit­u­a­tion exac­er­bate the sig­nif­i­cance of his fate, imbu­ing his procla­ma­tions of solace with some­thing of a hol­low core. But the sub­tle inter­ac­tions between the pair paint a long and tur­bu­lent his­to­ry with min­i­mal recourse to direct expo­si­tion. McDon­agh sel­dom resorts to banal plot mechan­ics, opt­ing instead for hard­boiled dis­course which chan­nels the film’s themes by stealth. Rather than the unfold­ing of the plot, it is the process of watch­ing peo­ple in deep, detailed con­ver­sa­tion that pro­vides Calvary’s sim­plest pleasure.

Yet just as the dia­logue attacks its sub­ject through indi­rect means, Cal­vary is more than a blunt trea­tise on devo­tion ver­sus athe­ism. Dur­ing his var­i­ous show­downs, Gleeson’s priest rarely cites scrip­ture as a moral prece­dent, attempt­ing to oper­ate as a coun­sel­lor who realis­es that a mean­ing­ful emo­tion­al con­nec­tion can only be forged through dis­course removed from any of the Bible’s anti­quat­ed or haughty notions. But McDon­agh is noth­ing if not even-hand­ed, and he has made a film which gets to the heart of what it means to hold reli­gious val­ues in the 21^st cen­tu­ry. This is not a blind faith in mag­ic and mir­a­cles or the oppor­tu­ni­ty to admin­is­ter life lessons to your fel­low man, but as a human con­duit for empathy.