Brendan Gleeson: Film review: Calvary – essential viewing

IRISH POST

By Stephen Martin on April 17, 2014

Calvary
Director: John Michael McDonagh
Starring: Brendan Gleeson, Chris O’Dowd, Aidan Gillen, Dylan Moran, Kelly Reilly and Pat Shortt
★★★★ (out of five)

“I FIRST tasted semen when I was seven years old,” are the first words of dialogue in John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary, as uttered by a disembodied voice to a discombobulated priest in a darkened church confessional.

“Certainly a startling opening line,” the priest responds, voicing the thoughts of the audience. “Is that supposed to be irony?” the disgruntled confessor asks. “I’m sorry,” the priest says, “let’s start again.”

This introductory exchange sets up the narrative style of McDonagh’s movie, fusing serious commentary with bone-dry satire.

McDonagh –a second-generation Irishman raised in central London – draws characters that spend most of the time conventionally acting out the absorbing drama, yet periodically collapse the artifice with deflating self-references.

They offer oblique winks to camera, breaking the fourth wall and waving across to the viewer. It’s a Brechtian, Beckettian, Bunuelian cocktail of forlorn hope, mordant humour and a cold moral vacuum. Yet all-the-while, it urges us not to have sleepless nights.

It’s also excellent, a cleverly-devised story (if a little thin on plot) featuring fine performances from top Irish talent. The superb Brendan Gleeson leads the cast as the embattled Fr James, vicar to an isolated coastal community, who is informed by one of his flock that he will kill him, “a week on Sunday,” in an abused victim’s revenge upon a depraved Catholic Church.

The man who makes this threat is known to Father James, though he remains a mystery to the audience until the climax.

“I’ll give you enough time to put your house in order,” he generously promises. The rest of the movie invites viewers to guess the identity of the killer among the townsfolk they meet, as the good father tends to his “pastoral duties”.

READ MORE HERE; http://www.irishpost.co.uk/entertainment/film-entertainment/calvary-review

Brendan Gleeson, son Domhnall, compete for IFTA's Best Actor prize

UPI
By KAREN BUTLER, United Press International   |   Feb. 27, 2014



Beloved Irish actor Brendan Gleeson and his son Domhnall were both nominated for the Irish Film and Television Award for Best Actor in a Film Thursday.

The elder Gleeson earned the nod for his work in "Calvary," while his offspring was nominated for his performance in "About Time." The actors previously co-starred in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" and "Six Shooter."

Up for the Best Picture IFTA are "Byzantium," "Calvary," "Run & Jump," "The Sea" and "The Stag."

Four of the five best film nominees also get mentions for Best Script -- John Banville for "The Sea," Ailbhe Keogan for "Run & Jump," John Michael McDonagh for "Calvary," and the duo of John Butler and Peter McDonald for "The Stag."



Read more: http://www.upi.com/Entertainment_News/Movies/2014/02/27/Brendan-Gleeson-son-Domhnall-compete-for-IFTAs-Best-Actor-prize/UPI-25751393512155/#ixzz2udMhFTFC

Brendan Gleeson dedicates film role to Ireland’s ‘good’ priests

IRISH TIMES
Derek Scally
February 10, 2014



Actor Brendan Gleeson has dedicated his new movie role to Ireland’s good priests, the ones he said have been overlooked or even tarred by recent clerical abuse scandals.

Mr Gleeson, promoting ‘Calvary’ at the Berlin Film Festival, said he was motivated by the memory of a “particularly good Christian Brother in primary school ... Brother Pat Grogan, a beautiful man”.

‘Calvary’, already hailed by Sundance critics as Beckett-meets-Bresson, enthused Berlin audiences yesterday with one critic calling it a “wonderful, disturbing, sad movie”. It opens this year’s Jameson Dublin Film Festival.

“I think there have been a few false accusations of paedophilia, life-wrecking allegations, against good men amongst all the proper exposure of bad men,” said Mr Gleeson in Berlin yesterday. “Imagine being a good person who has given their life to doing good things, finding themselves wearing a uniform that has been besmirched. It must be horrible for anyone who commits to good to be reviled for doing so.”

‘Calvary’ tells the story of a middle-aged Irish man who becomes a priest in a hostile environment, a role Gleeson said was “the most pressurised” he’d ever experienced,

READ MORE HERE: http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/film/gleeson-dedicates-film-role-to-ireland-s-good-priests-1.1686323

Brendan Gleeson plays an innocent priest slapped with a death sentence in John Michael McDonagh's exquisitely nuanced second feature."Calvary":SUNDANCE REVIEW

THE HOLLYWOOD REVIEW
 2:42 AM PST 1/20/2014 by David Rooney

John Michael McDonagh’s 2011 debut, The Guard, provided the wonderful Brendan Gleeson with a vehicle for some of his best screen work, playing an Irish West Country cop unencumbered by diplomacy skills. But the follow-up collaboration of the writer-director and lead actor is in a whole different league. Gleeson’s performance as a man of profound integrity suffering for the sins of others is the lynchpin of this immensely powerful drama, enriched by spiky black comedy but also by its resonant contemplation of faith and forgiveness. Representing a considerable leap in thematic scope and craft for McDonagh, Calvary deserves to reach the widest possible audience.

As with the work of McDonagh's younger brother, the playwright, screenwriter and director Martin McDonagh, an inherent irreverence is essential to the work. But don’t let the gags, the ripe profanity and the wicked comic characterizations fool you. The director of Calvary appears utterly serious about exploring the uses and abuses of spirituality in a world of toxic disillusionment and cynicism.

Set along the rocky cliffs of County Sligo, the film begins in the intimacy of a Catholic Church confessional box. Father James (Gleeson) listens as the voice on the opposite side of the covered window recounts being sexually abused by a clergyman from the age of seven. The unseen parishioner informs the priest that he’s giving him a week to make his peace with God and the world, arranging a Sunday meeting on the beach where he intends to kill him. Since the man who molested him died long ago, he reasons that the death of an innocent priest will make more of a statement.

That would appear to be an irreversibly grim departure point for a film. But McDonagh and the actors navigate supple shifts between mordant humor and emotionally complex drama throughout much of Calvary.

Father James appears to have recognized the voice, and while he seeks counsel from the Bishop (David McSavage), he declines to name his prospective murderer, even later when a violent warning suggests the seriousness of the threat. Instead, in what amounts to an anticipatory whodunit that’s equal parts Agatha Christie and Stations of the Cross, he makes his regular parish rounds.

He meets with the cuckolded local butcher (Chris O’Dowd), his tarty wife (Orla O’Rourke) and her occasional lover (Isaach de Bankole). Further encounters follow with a semi-reclusive American writer (M. Emmet Walsh), a smug financier (Dylan Moran) and an atheistic, coke-snorting doctor (Aiden Gillen). There’s also the police inspector (Gary Lydon) and the cop’s regular rent boy (Owen Sharpe).

McDonagh’s crackling dialogue makes the priest’s exchanges with the townsfolk so frequently hilarious that you don’t really notice the sobering shift that has taken place. Each of the parishioners goes out of his or her way to challenge Father James’ convictions. Whether generalized or personal, their goading remarks seem designed to remind him that the Catholic Church as an institution is at best obsolete, at worst morally broken, and that his religious compassion can do little to fix anyone’s messy lives.

Absorbing the constant criticism with forbearance and only rarely rising to the bait, James is a firmly centered man, and Gleeson etches a lifetime’s worth of knowledge, experience and hard-won serenity into the ruddy face behind his snowy beard, even if he's not without acknowledged flaws. “You’re just a little too sharp for this parish,” the butcher’s wife tells him. And it’s true, his worldly intelligence and gentle philosophical bent stick out, especially next to the lightweight younger priest (David Wilmot).


READ MORE HERE: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/calvary-sundance-review-672450