Calvary is rough
going.
The film begins with an Irish priest (Brendan Gleeson)
sitting in confessional. He’s
listening to a man recount his tale of having been raped by a priest at the age
of seven. Then he hears the man
say that since the rapist is long dead, the man will take the life of one good
priest in a week’s time. Brendan
Gleeson is the good priest.
One could go a lot of places with a story like this. It could be a pre-murder mystery. It could be a meditation on faith. It could be a thriller. This film’s approach, however, is right
there in the title: Calvary. This is The Passion of the Christ, with the scorn of an Irish village and
the sting of cruel words taking the place of the scorn of Jerusalem and the
sting of the lash.
You see, this is an Ireland reeling from financial meltdown
and revelations of years of sexual abuse at the hands of the clergy. The people of our priest’s little town
have not only lost faith, they’ve turned actively hostile to faith, actively
hostile to the church, actively hostile to our priest.
And in the middle of it all, walking his own road to
Calvary, our priest struggles to maintain his own dignity, his own faith, his
own love. He’s miserable.
On one level then, we can view Calvary as an exercise in making Brendan Gleeson unhappy. On another, however, we can see it as a
story of the very toughest part of Christianity: the imperative to actively
love people who may actively hate you.
As such, Calvary has much to
offer the devout viewer.
But that viewer is going to have to work for it. This is not a film for the faint of
heart or faith.
