McDonagh: Calvary (2014)

Calvary is the second collaboration between John Michael McDonagh and Brendan Gleeson, following The Guard. This time around, Gleeson plays a priest, Father James Lavelle, who’s told in confession that he has seven days to live. The film plays out over that week, as we’re introduced to a succession of characters in Lavelle’s remote Irish parish, all of whom feel like they could be the confessor. Like The Guard, there’s an odd, unsettling fusion of comedy and high drama, but it’s slightly more refined here – for the most part, it feels as if a certain terse, bluff levity is part and parcel of this community’s idiolect, a resilience mechanism that the film simply happens to capture and document without ever becoming a comedy in itself. More than that, it protects the film from its own incipient nihilism, since, with the exception of his daughter, who comes to stay for the week, most of the characters Lavelle encounters are bruised, battered or corrupted beyond all redemption or recognition – especially those played by comic actors, with Chris O’Dowd and Dylan Moran putting in especially chilling performances. It’s no surprise, then, that Lavelle holds forgiveness as the greatest virtue, but what is perhaps surprising is how magnificently the film’s terseness forgives its characters, painting them in broad, Catholic brushstrokes that balloon them out into promontories buffeted by broad Celtic beaches, bathed in the same clean light as the earliest British missionaries, only to contract them again into dim, sheltered echo chambers that make every conversation feel like a confession, even or especially when they’re not aware that they’re making it. Perhaps that’s why Lavelle often feels more like a missionary than a priest, an envoy from the Catholic Church back into its most sinful, shrouded recesses - in his hands, the film distills into a sustained act of penitence, an expiatory edifice illuminated from within, with all the gestural economy and luminosity of a passion play. It ends, as it must, with devastating humility, but that also makes it feel as if it doesn’t really end, or as if the ending is no more important than the process of watching it. Like the conclusion to The Guard, it casts you back upon the main body of the film, asking you to relive it, even imitate it, in something close to a cinematic devotional manual, designed to render Calvary lyrically and languorusly available to a lay audience.