In the most Catholic country on earth, a bitter nonbeliever tells a priest, “Your time is gone.” Replies the cleric, “My time will never be gone.” With much sober reflection, the devastating parable “Calvary” considers which one of these people is right.
It begins with a churchgoer we can’t see explaining in a confessional booth that he was raped for years by a priest, now dead. As payback, the victim says, he will kill the priest to whom he is talking, a week from Sunday. That this intended victim is entirely innocent is the whole point.
In the meantime the film becomes a rapt combination of external suspense and internal scrutiny — a kind of “High Noon” of the soul. The priest ministers to the many sinners in his flock in rural Ireland, absorbs their attacks on his Church, and considers his options while the clock ticks down.
As Father James, the priest whose counsel is in his listening, Brendan Gleeson is a magnificent presence, a man of decency and depth and well-earned wisdom. He walks wreathed in ancient authority and sacred trust. And yet Gleeson is also a sharply modern presence, an arch student of sin who recognizes that with authority comes a kind of responsibility — for the Church’s own grievous trespasses.
One local (an unnerving, sinister Aidan Gillen) is an atheist ER surgeon who has seen too much flesh mortified and scorns the idea of religion offering a counterpoint to the pointless carnage he sees every day. Another is an adulteress, another a serial killer, another a crooked financier. One of the gravest sinners is the priest’s own daughter (Kelly Reilly), from a previous life when he was married. She attempted suicide.
The wonder of the film by John Michael McDonagh (“The Guard”) is that its images of a church aflame (and the Church aflame) read as tragic.
References to the pedophilia scandals and Church hypocrisy come from heartbreak rather than hate, and “Calvary” wells with respect for men like Father James. This balance, together with the film’s moral seriousness and refusal to take cheap shots, is why I’d recommend it with equal enthusiasm to two groups I know well — Catholics and atheists.
The delicate scenes of Father James trying to steer parishioners down the right path as Sunday approaches are alternately elliptical and potent, but they also lend sly concealment to the brilliance of McDonagh’s overall scheme. This is a simmering, tantalizing suspense tale on two levels — we want to know who the supposed killer is. At the same time, McDonagh has set up on another track a contemporary Gospel allegory of enormous power and compassion. When both routes conclude at the same destination, the feeling is nearly an epiphany. Twice I have left a “Calvary” screening feeling dazed and moved.
“There’s too much talk about sins and not enough talk about virtues,” Father James proclaims, and we want him to be right. The trouble is that what those sins have destroyed can’t readily be rebuilt, and a lone altar standing woefully amid ashy rubble is a symbol of a resulting future, or maybe even a present, bereft of belief.