Review of Calvary (2014) by Mark M — 06 Dec 2014

Calvary's plot and how it revolves around a Christian priest might deplete the interest of a potential viewer who doesn't want to witness any religious gobbledygook, but it is ultimately a movie that beckons the viewer to cast aside any personal religious bias - or a lack thereof - to enjoy a character driven story rather than one which, well, lets Jesus take the wheel.

Father James isn't the kind of priest that brazenly quotes scriptures from the Bible without a care in the world for whoever he might offend, or one that delivers fire-and-brimstone sermons about Christianity; Father James is merely a man of the cloth that just wants to talk to the characters in Calvary about their problems without dragging a spiritual figure into the picture. Now being threatened with an attempt on his life within a week, he takes the calm approach of going about the following week as though it were any other week, as he ultimately decides on what he would do as the days draw closer to possibly the last Sunday he will witness on this plane of existence.

As his daughter, Fiona (Kelly Reilly) pays Father James a visit, a series of events in the small Irish town that Father James is a priest of, begins to trigger the hardest - and possibly last - week of his life, as not only is there a looming threat on his life, but he now has to deal with making amends with his estranged daughter and her personal demons, his personal demons and the demons of those who come to his parish. These range from the adulterous Veronica Brennan, to the atheist Dr. Frank Harte (Aiden Gillen), and while most of these characters - bar Fiona - are undeveloped for the most part, they all play specific roles in not only testing Father James' resolve, but in the many controversies that have plagued the priesthood since the dawn of time, such as sexual abuse, with the themes being presented through unsettling dark humour; the intense, thematically disturbing monologue by Harte in the bar, with the sudden violent shift in Father James' personality, is one of the few selling points of Calvary.

Following the sleight of movies with veteran actors I've watched recently - James Gandolfini in The Drop (2014) and Philip Seymour Hoffman in A Most Wanted Man (2014) - Brendan Gleeson's performance is just as amazing as his previously mentioned peers. Pushing sixty years of age, Gleeson carries the role of Father James - and the weight of the entire movie - amazingly, grounding his role in likeability and realism, with a nuanced range of acting as the character is consistently 'tested' throughout the events of Calvary.

A thought barreled through my head as the credits rolled, that if Gleeson had not been cast as Father James, John Michael McDonagh's Calvary's narrative would've most likely had come in second after crashing against the seaside precipice and the beautiful backdrop of sweeping Irish vistas captured by cinematographer Larry Smith of Only God Forgives (2013) and Bronson (2008).