Movie review: Calvary

Brendan Gleeson (here with Kelly Reilly) has a commanding presence in Calvary.

More serious-minded and less ingratiating than the anarchic knockabout comedy The Guard, the director and star's previous outing together, the new film by McDonagh (brother of the more famous Martin) is nonetheless a bit clever for its own good.

There's a playful and knowing self-referentiality about it that begins with the screenplay's second line and undermines the gravitas that it tries to lay claim to in the last reel.

Calvary purports to be the second part (after The Guard) of something called "The Glorified Suicide Trilogy", though the trilogy was first mentioned only in April, so that may be a leg-pull: part three, The Lame Shall Enter First has been foreshadowed. As the title suggests (Calvary was the site of the Crucifixion), the story concerns itself with spiritual matters, but McDonagh's comment in press notes that it's "basically Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest with a few gags thrown in" has the alienatingly smart-arse tone that dogs the film as a whole.

The prolific and reliable Gleeson is Father James Lavelle, the priest in a small seaside village in County Sligo who, in the opening scene, has a death sentence passed on him by a parishioner during confession. The man who says he will kill him (he even makes an appointment for "Sunday week, on the beach") was repeatedly abused as a boy by a now-dead priest. Exacting revenge on his blameless successor will have good shock value, he says.

So far, so Irish: this is not so much a whodunnit as a who'll-do-it. Obviously Lavelle knows who it is but for reasons that only slowly become clear and only barely become plausible, he doesn't go to the cops.

Instead, his impending death sets up a series of loosely connected vignettes in which the priest's encounters with various parishioners - the via dolorosa leading to his Calvary - highlight various moral imponderables: God vs Mammon, mortality, fate, infidelity, church politics and the global financial crisis all get a look in.

As a result, the carpentry shows, though it's grounded by Gleeson's substantial screen presence and the cinematography is sumptuous. But it never develops the dramatic arc promised by the opening.

Its conclusion appears to be, in Lavelle's words, that "forgiveness is highly underrated", but I couldn't help feeling that Bresson would have thought that a little glib.

Cast:

Brendan Gleeson, Chris O'Dowd, Kelly Reilly, Dylan Moran, Aidan Gillen, Pat Shortt, Isaach De Bankole, M Emmet Walsh, Marie-Josee Croze, Domhnall Gleeson, David Wilmot.

Director:

John Michael McDonagh

Running TIme:

100 mins

Rating:

tbc

Verdict:

A black comedy too smart-arsed for its own good.

- TimeOut