Sunday Review: Calvary

A flawed, personal review

By Bob Boldt

[Author’s Note: This review is a further exploration of the subject of Morris Dean’s detailed examination of the 2014 film Calvary, starring Brendan Gleeson. A reading of his review will help readers who have seen the film remember salient details. I hope that my review will encourage a continuing conversation about this important artistic work.
    I also hope that people who have not seen the film will excuse me for a spoiler or two included in this review. I don’t think people should read reviews of movies before seeing them and I don’t really write movie reviews for people who have not already seen the film.]

Being human is the most terrible loneliness in the universe. –A. A. Attanasio

When I was 12, my favorite movie heroes were Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, and Gene Autry. Saturday afternoon there was always a feature starring one of these protagonists at my local theater. I can remember being strongly influenced by the behavior of my heroes, to the extent that, upon leaving the theater, it would often take me an extraordinary amount of time to shake my total identification with them. I can remember walking out of the theater feeling strangely affected by the way the daemons of these characters possessed me. I cannot remember exactly when I lost this feeling of identification or when its effect left me. It may have coincided with some early loss-of-faith experiences driven by my mental and spiritual precociousness.
    I was reminded of these long-ago experiences when a friend who saw Brendan Gleeson in The Guard said the actor reminded him of me. Of course I don’t think he resembles me in any way. I didn’t even care for that film, but it got me to thinking again about the extent to which we consciously or unconsciously identify our condition and character with actors in movies. I believe we are as innocent in the dark of a movie theater as Tom Waits says we are when we dream. And as influenced.
    Calvary reminded me again just how much I love character-driven movies. I wonder whether movies really ought not portray anything else. So many special effects now leave me so flat that I sometimes think movies that rely on CGI effects ought to be banned as blasphemies against reality and Nature herself.
    The thing I love most about movies like these is the way you know they got a hold of you. Sometimes it doesn’t occur until a day later. It might begin with the memory of a certain scene popping up, or the memory of a fragment of landscape arising like an old vacation photograph. The first evidence that Calvary was going to have a permanent hold on me was a few hours after watching it. I was suddenly struck with the horror of one of the stories told by a character in the movie.
    The scene concerns a story related by an emergency room physician of a child rendered literally locked in darkness by a botched operation, unable to connect in any way with the world or be communicated with. Presumably this is one of many such experiences that made the doctor an atheist. How could a loving, personal God….etc.?
    Since my earliest days, theological issues and experiences have always been central and critical to my way of seeing the world. That is why I regard my atheism (failure to believe in a personal God) as an essential way I have come to understand the world. Of course my arrival at this condition, it can be argued, is probably as faith-based in my case as belief in a personal deity is for a believer. Why then am I so profoundly moved by ostensibly “religious” films like Of Gods and Men, Edge of Heaven, Doubt, and Calvary? It is just that I believe monotheism is only one of the ways of answering the existential, theological questions that confront the spiritual seeker. Just because I reject the monotheistic answers does not mean I reject the importance of a theological answer (absent a Theos?).
    Calvary for me was primarily concerned with a profound human disconnection in all its aspects: disconnection from God, our fellows, colleagues, family, and even our own pasts. It aroused in me memories of Igmar Bergman’s film Winter Light. Father James becomes obsessed with the idea of connection in a fallen world that is becoming for him increasingly a litany of one disconnecting experience after another. It is a tale of a Job tested by the removal of all meaning from his life.
    It is also about the most disconnected, metaphorical entities of all, ghosts. One of Father James’s artistic, communion-wine-tippling altar boys comments about a beach landscape he is sketching. Father James asks about two figures featured in his rendering of the scene. This is prescient, as we will later discover. “I’ve had dreams lately about ghosts,” the boy responds. “That may be why I painted those two figures into the scene there.” And of course the largest ghost of all in the film is William Butler Yeats, who only manifests himself in long, brooding landscape shots of Ben Bulben, the tower, and the bay.

Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-digger's toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.
            –from “Under Ben Bulben,” byWilliam Butler Yeats

I believe the ultimate message of the film Calvary is one of acceptance, redemption, and (yes) salvation. Stephen Jenkinson states that one of the critical issues of the end of life is the acceptance of the inevitable loss of competency, or agency. By accepting his inability to have any perceivable effect on things around him, Father James comes in the end to a realization that the only effective action is (as the Buddhists say) right action – an action performed out of compassion without attachment to consequences. This includes even an admission of and acceptance of the very disconnection he has been, in his priestly way, resisting since he took his holy orders. It might even be said that, by his not fleeing his final Sunday appointment, he is functioning as a perfect imitation of Christ – an innocent willfully giving up his life as expiation for the sin of the very Church whose theology and practice have so grievously failed both Father James and humanity. “Calvary” is an apt title for the film.
    Are we also being asked by the filmmaker to accept an unexplained future that goes lumbering on after us as if we had never existed? There is a montage of tableau images at the end of the film that reminds us that life and living will go on all wound up and running on and on without us. That for me will probably be among my last dying thoughts: “How will the future carry me?” as Stephen Jenkinson says.

    I know film reviewers must at all costs pretend to understand films better even than their directors. Well. I admit I do not understand the brief scene at the end of the montage in which Fiona, Father James’s daughter, speaks over the prison visiting phone with her father’s murderer. That scene opens us up to so many alternative and contradictory meanings that it would fit quite seamlessly into a Michael Haneke film. I accept that too.

First addendum. I fully expect that my take on Calvary will change over time, and keep changing. After writing the section above, I began to have some problems with the film that did not originally occur to me. For me, the idea of compassion and forgiveness have come to nearly eclipse my original idea of the theme of the film. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the theme of the film has come to seem to me to be the juxtaposing of compassion with human disconnection. That’s on the plus side.
    What troubled me most, in my rethinking of the film, was Father James’s compulsion to keep that Sunday appointment on the beach. Originally I saw it as a kind of metaphorical attempt to expiate ecclesiastical and personal sin. In the real world, though, what kind of person would deliberately sacrifice himself at the hands of a deranged person to no practical end? Only a committed masochist would consent to such a suicide pact. The grotesque shot (repeated four times for emphasis) of the back of Father James’s head being blown off seemed to me inexplicably gratuitous. The first time I saw the film, it put me off and I ignored it. The second time, those shots completely damaged the effect of the most important portion of the film for me. All I can ask of the director is “Why?”
    In each of the three films starring Brendan Gleeson I have seen, the principal character suffers a graphically intense demise. It makes me wonder whether his agent has some stipulation to that effect that his characters must always end that way, something like the way Kate Winslet must always display her breasts in her films.
    I am wondering now, in a hindsight perspective, if perhaps I am giving the director (John Michael McDonagh) more credit than he deserves. Have I perhaps had my perception of Calvary skewed by the incredible performance and interpretation of the character of Father James by Brendan Gleeson? As I said, after I saw The Guard, I really disliked it and found the characters and plot badly directed. Was I perhaps giving too much undeserved/unearned credit to the director? The lack of directorial authority might help explain the difficulty I had with the last shot in Calvary. Most people would prefer to see the daughter, Fiona, as forgiving the murderer. But could there even be a hint of lust in her voluptuous glances? I am going to have to stay with my original ambivalence over the last scene and again chalk it up to my suspicion that, like Father James’s “suicide,” it is a practical improbability.
    I still haven’t compared my impression with other, more qualified reviewers. I did read one review by a Roman Catholic Bishop who tried to view Calvary as a repudiation of those critical of the Church and a weird sort of expiation for pedophilia. I stopped reading reviews altogether after that one. It even put me off my feed for a couple of days.

Second addendum. In Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol, we observe, by way of a series of increasingly deranged diary posts, a mind gradually deteriorating into barking madness. As I began this second addendum to what is now becoming a minor obsession with the meaning of Calvary, I thought of an idea for a short story along the lines of Gogol’s Diary. It concerns a noted film reviewer who becomes increasingly obsessed with reviewing a particular favorite film of his. Each revision of the review probes deeper and deeper into the substance, the symbolism, and the clues he sees to the hidden meaning of the film he is reviewing. Gradually his profound analysis of the hidden meanings becomes more and more bizarre and abstracted as his paranoid schizophrenia gradually, incrementally overcomes his reason. The final entry reads like a last poem by Antonin Artaud.
    I promise to stop these addenda at the first sign of dementia.

    I noticed in Calvary that the director of photography always left ample room for the environment to inform the nature of the dialogue/action taking place within it. The first place I noticed this was when Father James visits the butcher, whom he now knows to be his future assassin. The dialogue takes place in the meat locker amid great sides of bovine carcasses. The reference to the work of Irish artist Francis Bacon is immediately apparent, especially with reference to his portrait “Figure with Meat,” which is in turn a reference to Diego Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X.

From Tumblr:

Figure with Meat is a 1954 painting by the Irish-born artist Francis Bacon. The figure is based on the Pope Innocent X portrait by Diego Velázquez; however, in the Bacon painting the Pope is shown as a gruesome figure and placed between two bisected halves of a cow. The carcass hanging in the background is likely derived from Rembrandt’s “Carcass of Beef,” 1657. The painting is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
    According to Mary Louise Schumacher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Bacon appropriated the famous portrait, with its subject, enthroned and draped in satins and lace, his stare stern and full of authority. In Bacon’s version, animal carcasses hang at the pope’s back, creating a raw and disturbing Crucifixion-like composition. The pope’s hands, elegant and poised in Velázquez’s version, are rough hewn and gripping the church’s seat of authority in apparent terror. His mouth is held in a scream and black striations drip down from the pope’s nose to his neck. It’s as if Bacon picked up a wide house painting brush and brutishly dragged it over the face. The fresh meat recalls the lavish arrangements of fruits, meats and confections in 17th-century vanitas paintings, which usually carried subtle moralizing messages about the impermanence of life and the spiritual dangers of sensual pleasures. Sometimes, the food itself showed signs of being overripe or spoiled, to make the point. Bacon weds the imagery of salvation, worldly decadence, power and carnal sensuality, and he contrasts those things with his own far more palpable and existential view of damnation.”

    There is an undoubted connection between the horror the young man received at the hands of the pedophile priests, his decision to become a butcher (render unto life what life hath rendered unto you), his sexual dysfunction and spousal abuse.
    The attempt of Fiona in the last scene will no doubt be preferred to be seen by most as some act of forgiveness. What if it isn’t? I see no reason to believe Fiona is not still a pretty sick puppy. In the last phone conversation with her father we see Father James positioned in equal visual intensity with the ruined tower in the background. In the background of Fiona’s London balcony there is prominently displayed a postmodern example of what looks like a tower collapsed into the remaining part of the building.

Those two structures must speak volumes about the way the two relationships are now to be terminated. Father James’s world is collapsed, disconnected with the world except as a curious historical artifact, whereas Fiona’s is symbolized by the bizarre and contradictory structures of postmodern architecture. She is far from resolving her conflicts and subduing the demons who first inspired that “classic mistake” suicide attempt that was evident when we first met her. It opens one up to all nature of speculation. Who killed Bruno, Father James’s dog? I believe Jack Brennan when he said he didn’t do it. It had to be someone close to the creature and trusting. This speculation reminds me of the true-culprit speculation surrounding the tripping of the horse and rider in Michael Haneke’s film White Ribbon. This last minute detail of who killed the dog is important and leads us to yet more speculations that would run contradictory to the supposedly positive message of the film. Why would Fiona look so voluptuously at the butcher of her father? Was he in some strange way the uninvited agent of her Electra complex? Is she subconsciously grateful for his act? Does she secretly wish he could be her butcher too?

[I can’t say there won’t be a third addendum. If there is, I’ll post it as a comment.]

Copyright © 2015 by Bob Boldt