Personally, I don’t set much store by the IFTAs but if any Irish, or Irish-made film is going to win anything, in any competition, this year it should to be John Michael McDonagh’s monumentally accomplished Calvary.
The recent awards probably won themselves a little credibility by citing the movie in the best actor (Brendan Gleeson) and best screenplay (McDonagh) categories and then combining the contribution of both to the movie’s overall achievement by giving it the best picture award.
We’ve been saying for years that what the Irish film industry needs is good scripts - and McDonagh finally delivers with Calvary; this is a movie that can go out into the world and compete with anything that anyone, anywhere has to offer.
It is clever, funny, insightful, mature; classically constructed and paced, with a deeply soulful central performance from the incomparable Gleeson. Just as this may be the Irish movie that we’ve been waiting for, Calvary is certainly the movie that Gleeson deserves.
It is a story that sets the date for a murder and then introduces the suspects. In an opening confession sequence, Gleeson’s Fr James Lavelle is told by one of his parishioners that he was abused by a priest when he was a child. “I was seven years old when I first tasted semen,” is the dramatic introductory line.
He then announces that even though Fr James is a good priest, he intends to hold him accountable for the sins of his brethren (hence the title) and will kill him the following Sunday. The priest has a week to put his house in order.
Fr James spends the seven days visiting his parishioners and as he engages with them, the movie develops not so much as a 'whodunit' but more a who-will-do-it and a theological inquiry into the point and value and purpose of religion and faith to these people.
James’ meetings with the boisterous butcher, the supercilious retired banker, the coke-snorting atheist doctor are played as spiky, thorny, puckish jousts that give the movie a buoyancy that holds right up to the end.
The landscape of personalities is expansive and far more wide-ranging than you might expect to find in a real Irish village or small town – an Ivory coast motor mechanic, an aged and much-travelled American writer, Fr
James even visits a convicted serial killer in prison - giving the sense that Calvary’s spiritual debate is much bigger than the setting in which it takes place.
McDonagh has said that Calvary is the second part of a trilogy that began with The Guard and will conclude with the story of a paraplegic who hates the able-bodied. I can’t wait - but by the time the new film arrives, I’ll certainly have seen Calvary two or three times more.
Philip Molloy presents The Picture Show on Newstalk at 6pm on Saturdays.
