Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Movies

Brendan Gleeson shines in powerful ‘Calvary’

PARK CITY — Filmmaker-playwright Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges,” “Seven Psychopaths”), who might be called the Tarantino of Ireland, and he and his big brother John Michael McDonagh (“The Guard”) usually trade in black-comic genre offerings full of gangsters and hit men. But rarely has either brother aimed as high as John’s latest Sundance offering, “Calvary,” a profound and wrenching meditation on faith in general and Catholicism in particular.

It wouldn’t suit a McDonagh to fail to come up with a grabby plot device, though, and this movie has an irresistible hook: Father James (a towering Brendan Gleeson), a kindly but worldly priest in a small Irish town, is informed by an unseen parishioner in a confession box that he was raped and sodomized by a priest as a small boy. The priest in question is long dead, the parishioner explains, but someone must pay. So he vows to murder the innocent Father James a week from Sunday.

Father James spends the week checking in with members of his tiny flock and his visiting daughter (Kelly Reilly) from a long-ago period before James joined the clergy. Sin is all around: the daughter attempted suicide and the parishioners are jokey blasphemers who jeer Fr. James for his faith and for the failings of the Church. A particularly acerbic local, expertly played by “Game of Thrones” actor Aidan Gillen, is a trauma surgeon at the hospital whose acquaintance with suffering has made him an atheist, and he jousts with the amiable priest about why a merciful God would allow such things as an E.R. doctor sees every day. Meanwhile, as he wonders how to handle his upcoming showdown Father James loses his temper. He acquires a pistol and loads it, though what he intends to do with it isn’t quite clear.

This film seems destined to spark the interest of Catholics and non-Catholics in equal measure. It avoids the usual cheap shots in favor of a serious and sobering consideration of the Church and its many “issues.” Thanks to Gleeson’s extraordinarily sensitive portrait of the increasingly cantankerous pistol-packing priest, I can picture this devastating film being quietly discussed in Catholic church groups as well as attracting the eager interest of outsiders who share the townsfolk’s disdain for the Church. McDonagh’s tender, funny and agonized screenplay should receive much consideration come awards season, and Gleeson is long overdue for his first Oscar nomination.