Calvary (dir. John Michael McDonagh)
Anyone familiar with John McDonagh’s initial outing, The Guard, will be aware of the acerbic
wit and caustic dialogue that so gloriously flourishes under the pen of both he
and his brother, Martin McDonagh (In
Bruges, Seven Psychopaths). Whilst that bitter tone isn’t missing from Calvary, a certain amount of the comic undercutting
is, a deliberate composition that is encapsulated in the film’s opening line: “I first tasted semen when I was seven years
old…”
The film opens with Brendan Gleeson’s priest sat in a
confession box, the silence drags out, the camera unrelenting in its study of
Gleeson’s face before this line shatters the silence. What follows is a
sentence. Not a command of one ‘Our Father’ and several ‘Hail Mary’s’ from the
priest but, rather, the ominous threat of death from a pained, and abused
member of the rural Irish community. The stage is then set for County Sligo’s
cast of jaded parishioners: Dylan Moran plays the town squire undergoing an
existential crisis as a result of his illicit practices as a banker, Chris O’Dowd
enters as the cuckolded butcher whose wife, it is revealed by her Ghana-born
lover, has many boyfriends in a town that, apparently, is able to collect in
one small building.
If one wishes, the opening gambit of the film allows for a whodunit of sorts to play out amidst
this curtain call of melancholia. For Freud, the distinction between mourning
and melancholia is such that ‘[i]n mourning it is the world which has become
poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself'. McDonagh’s lens
brilliantly captures the landscape of the Irish coast, asserting that the
troubles here are within rather than without. Trauma is aplenty amidst this
community, not least in the central figure of Gleeson’s priest as the arrival
of his daughter (Kelly Reilly) proves. What is absurd about the trauma is the way
in which it is dealt with. Whereas Father Lavelle’s daughter follows the Freudian
tradition by turning guilt-ridden anger onto the self, making the vital error
of cutting across and not down, the rest of this motley-crew seem determined to
make the good priest suffer for their various pains. Whether it is through
humiliation as Dylan Moran’s drunken banker pisses over a Holbein masterpiece,
violence as he meets the force of a baseball bat, or the goading of the rest of
the community, Gleeson acts as a Christ-like figure that bears witness to the
sins of a humanity that may be beyond salvation.
Ultimately, the priest himself is unable to resist inflicting
his own pains onto others, snapping at a fellow clergyman that he should be
working in an insurance firm rather than the Church; an indictment that leads
this “man-of-faith” to turn to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. McDonagh makes it clear, Gleeson’s character is
from the same world as the community he is part of, his reference points (from
Robert Herrick to “felching”) are the same, he is as worldly a man as any we
have seen in McDonagh’s films. What is different is his relentless desire to
rid his parish of cynicism, marking, perhaps, a change in scope for this
director. Calvary is altogether a
more serious work, but one in which the McDonagh’s talent for cultivated wit
can still be enjoyed. Making his entrance into acting late, just as his priest
enters into the Church in his middle-years, Gleeson turns out his best
performance yet, an assured effort that carries McDonagh’s vision meticulously.
