CALVARY
Director John Michael McDonagh
Cert 15, 102 mins
Calvary’s Father James (Brendan Gleeson) is a ‘good’ Catholic priest who entered the priesthood after the death of his wife, and who had tasted something of sin himself.
He is faced with a sinister death threat from one of his flock, who suffered from child abuse at the hands of the church, to be executed on a coming Sunday. He continues to comfort his fragile daughter and is faced with deep smouldering resentment against the church. First his church is torched and then he finds his dog is killed.
The hell-hounds close in on him, as he seeks to counsel his parishioners, lost souls awash in scurrilous behaviour that is destroying them – the victims of devils who push their prey into the abyss like in medieval paintings, against the idyllic backdrop of rural County Sligo.
Anything Father James says of a good and spiritual nature as he grapples to help them, is brushed off, laughed at, or not heard by them. His frustration drives him back to drink and violence. Ironically he is comforted, in a moving scene, by the faith of a young woman who has lost her husband in a driving accident.
Before he meets his end, Father James says the church has spoken too much of sins and not enough of virtues (good old thomist aristotelian moral theology).
This black tragedy is not for the faint hearted but it raises good questions. Virtues are the one thing our post-Christian world can’t understand. How do we speak in a world that is a hell before hell? It seems like a new theology of crisis and tragedy is needed today to speak frankly about God’s judgment. Has not monotonous discourse about the universal love of God numbed the world to the gospel that is bad news before good?
