Calvary, the terrific new film from writer-director John Michael McDonagh, is a whodunnit with a difference, a black comedy with aspirations, merrily lifting its name from the small hill outside Jerusalem where Jesus was slain. Calvary: the title serves notice and puts the viewer on guard. It flashes like the final destination on the front of a bus, as McDonagh proceeds to steer us back and forth along the west coast of Ireland, veering between the profane and the sacred, the damned and divine. We know where this is leading, whether we like it or not. Your best advice is to sit back, hang on to your rosary beads and enjoy the ride while it lasts.
In the darkness of the confession box, Father James (Brendan Gleeson) learns he is about to be killed. Behind the grille, a shadowy parishioner explains that he was abused as a child and is hellbent on revenge. Father James, as a representative of the church, has been selected to take the fall; the good priest parachuted in to deputise for the bad. His crucifixion is booked for the following Sunday, just down on the beach. The priest now has a week to put his own house in order.
Just who is the potential killer here? Father James believes that he knows his tormentor's identity, even if we do not. This spins the movie into an ongoing round of blind man's bluff, or the stations of the cross played as postmodern Cluedo. Could it be the boisterous local butcher (Chris O'Dowd) or the supercilious squire (Dylan Moran)? The baleful publican (Pat Shortt) or the impish little doctor (Aidan Gillen)? Who can tell? They're as bad as each other. Chaos reigns and we live in sin. For all I know, the culprit might just as easily be Father James's spluttering, straight-arrow colleague, Father Timothy Leary (David Wilmot). What does that tell us about the film's level of mischief? It names its blandest, most vanilla character after the notorious 60s acid guru who once claimed to have invented a new primary colour.
Full credit to McDonagh for keeping these pieces in play. The London-born film-maker made a bracing debut with 2011's The Guard, casting Gleeson as an unruly cop at large in Connemara. And yet Calvary, praise be, is on a different plane altogether. Here is a film with a deep love of language and a sharp sense of place; a puckish little tease that first purrs with pleasure and then shows us its claws. McDonagh bills this as the second part of his "glorified suicide trilogy", although it might more readily be viewed as a rueful wake for the Catholic church, mired in scandal, its authority waning.
Father James's rounds carry him around Sligo, where white water slaps black rocks and the laundry snaps on the washing line. This is the edge of the world but it's fallen already. The parishioners beat up their wives and snort coke in pub lavatories, barely bothering to pull the door closed behind them. These people are prickling with malice, mired in misery.Tellingly, the community's most purely contented individual appears to be Gillen's mordant non-believer, who sucks cigarettes outside the hospital and accepts his own limitations with a lip-smacking relish. "The atheistic doctor; it's a cliched role," he shrugs. "There aren't that many good lines."
Can we dispense with the mystery? It's a red herring anyway. What more interests Calvary is the hell that we make and the roles that we play. Its characters are all running on rails, reading from a script, at the mercy of their author, be it McDonagh or God. Father James regards his flock with a mounting exasperation. But is he really any different? He's saddled with the most tightly scripted role of them all: that of the good priest called to carry the cross for the world at large. And credit where it's due. Gleeson is majestic in the lead; I'm not convinced he's been better. He plays God's servant as a recovering alcoholic with an impossible task, variously fired by rage, reason and sadness. Here, at least, is a Christ we can relate to.
On first watching Calvary at the Sundance festival in January, I worried that the denouement felt too overtly operatic, a clanging false note, a straining for grandeur. But then again, how else could it be? The ending's written in the Gospels and the players are pawns. Besides, in the words of Father James: "There's too much talk about sins and not enough of virtues." Far better, on balance, to celebrate the virtues instead.
Come Sunday, the priest pads down through the village on his way to the beach, still wondering what form his salvation will take. The parishioners stand idle and watch him go down; the foursquare star of a slippery human comedy; a movie that runs on the blood of its rich, sticky dialogue and the theatrical sense of a planet in tatters. How refreshing it is, in the wake of Darren Aronofsky's lumbering, self-important Noah, to see a spiritual saga that is smart enough to take the route less travelled, the low road to glory. Calvary touches greatness. It crawls clear through the slime and comes out looking holy.
