Review: Calvary
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
[Grade: B] Where the laughs come with an almost overpoweringly bitter aftertaste.
City Paper grade: B
Sharing a pint with the Brothers McDonagh must lead to some weighty and acerbic conversations if their films are any indication. Martin McDonagh made the leap from stage to screen with a pair of blacker-than-pitch comedies (In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths), while older brother John Michael McDonagh launched his directorial career with the Bad Lieutenant-with-a-brogue comedy The Guard. The elder McDonagh reteams with star Brendan Gleeson for Calvary, where the laughs come with an almost overpoweringly bitter aftertaste as the writer-director tackles the ponderous dilemma of Catholic guilt.
The film begins in the confession booth, where Father James Lavelle is confronted by a victim of childhood sexual abuse who declares his intention to kill Lavelle a week later, as murdering a good priest would make a stronger statement than vindictively killing a bad one. Lavelle spends the next several days attending to his parishioners as he grapples with how to deal with his impending doom.
Like Gleeson’s character in The Guard, a drug- and booze-addled cop who ultimately does the right thing, Father Lavelle is a deeply flawed character with good intentions. He’s accepting of his wayward flock even as he grows bitterly angry at their resistance to his ministrations. Gleeson is adept at sketching a character's history
with just a few reactions, so that even those townsfolk who only appear for a scene or two are given a life and a history. Unfortunately, McDonagh doesn't draw them quite so deeply, embodying arguments rather than inventing characters, so that ultimately the film becomes a schematic argument about redemption and forgiveness rather than a fully fleshed-out story. Each one is quirky and caustic, well played by a strong cast that includes Chris O'Dowd, Isaach de Bankole and the star's son Dohmnall Gleeson, but they're all marionettes charging a specific bulwark of faith.
Like brother Martin’s sophomore effort, McDonagh takes a curious turn for the meta with Calvary. Lavelle continually discusses himself and his fellow townspeople as if they’re characters in a film, referring to the reciting of lines and the playing of roles. Where Seven Psychopaths made its layering of reality and fiction an intrinsic part of the film, in Calvary it feels far more artificial, just one more way for its characters to distance themselves from authenticity as the story trods on into unrepentant nihilism.
