12/31/14 (Part Three): Bless Me Father, For You Have Sinned

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absentee father, Aidan Gillen, Best of 2014, Brendan Gleeson, Calvary, Catholic church, child molestation, Chris O'Dowd, Church sex scandal, cinema, dark comedies, David McSavage, David Wilmot, Domhnall Gleeson, dramas, Dylan Moran, estranged family, father-daughter relationships, favorite films, film reviews, films, foreign films, forgiveness, Gary Lydon, Irish films, Isaach de Bankole, John Michael McDonagh, Kelly Reilly, Killian Scott, Larry Smith, M. Emmet Walsh, Marie-Josee Croze, Movies, New World in the Morning, Orla O'Rourke, Owen Sharpe, Pat Shortt, Patrick Cassidy, revenge, Roger Whittaker, secrets, set in Ireland, sins of the fathers, small town life, The Guard, writer-director

In a small, dim confessional, Father James (Brendan Gleeson) is calmly told by one of his parishioners that he is to be “sacrificed” the following Sunday, made to die for the sexual abuse that the unknown man suffered at the hands of another priest when he was a boy. The offending priest has since died but the man isn’t interested in making a “bad” priest pay: he wants Father James, a “good” priest, to take a bullet, since the Church will feel his loss harder. “Nothing to say, Father?,” the mysterious man asks, when he’s finished passing his judgment. “I’m sure I’ll think of something in a week,” Father James sardonically replies.

The week leading up to that fateful Sunday forms the crux of Irish auteur John Michael McDonagh’s amazing Calvary (2014), the stunning follow-up to his masterful debut, The Guard (2011). During that time, Father James will reflect on his own life, his failings, his victories and his faith. He’ll spend the time wandering about his tiny, coastal town, making small-talk with the parishioners, these “friends” and neighbors who secretly wish him dead, despite their smiles and condescending good natures: after all, he immediately knows who the wannabe assassin is, even if we don’t…in a town that small, everyone knows everyone else, regardless of the supposed “anonymity” of the confessional window. Despite his knowledge, however, Father James will go through the motions, investigating each “lead” as if it were a Holmes-worthy clue, biding his time until that inevitable, fateful meeting on the beach. Despite his own innocence, Father James is more than willing to become a victim, a sacrificial goat, if that’s what his town needs to heal…to keep on with the drudgery of life under the age-old grip of the Church, Ireland’s bloody past and its uncertain future.

From the jump, McDonagh’s Calvary grabs a hold of you and never lets go: from the great opening quote, by St. Augustine, to the haunting, empty Irish landscape shots that play over the final credits, this is a film that is so exquisitely crafted that it’s almost a Swiss clock. There’s an overarching sadness to the film, a sense of fate and inevitability that cuts across any of the film’s many joyful moments (there are plenty) and underlines all of its most dramatic ones (likewise, plenty). Truth be told, Calvary is one of the saddest films I’ve ever seen, although its sorrow is a mechanical heart, beating deep within the film’s chest and nearly invisible to the naked eye.

There’s a lot going on in Calvary, although McDonagh’s excellent script manages to make everything fit, even if it doesn’t always tie it all together with a big, red bow: the estranged relationship between Father James and his grown daughter, Fiona (Kelly Reilly)…the way in which the entitlement of the upper-class continues to determine the fate of the poor working stiff, as embodied by Dylan Moran’s boozy lord, Michael Fitzgerald…the way in which the terrible economy and bad housing market have conspired to marginalize the middle class nearly to the point of extinction…the importance of forgiveness in a world that would rather focus on punishment…the way in which the Catholic church’s priest sex scandals continue to influence and change the complex relationship between the clergy and the common people, slowly turning blind devotion into something more closely resembling abject hatred…the necessity of sacrifice as a form of healing…despite this wealth of themes and big ideas, Calvary never feels weighted down or overly preachy (no pun intended).

One of the things that helps Calvary stay afloat when other films might have sunk under this much ambition is the way in which McDonagh subtly uses humor (sometimes bright and laugh-out-loud funny, other times so dark and mean-spirited as to be practically unrecognizable as such) as a means of guiding us through the dark. As previously mentioned, Calvary is an intensely sad, unrelenting film: the characters that haunt its halls are such twisted, wretched, damaged individuals that this streak of gallows’-humor is an absolute necessity. When one character melodramatically describes how his “whole life has been an affectation,” Father James quietly responds that “that’s one of those lines that sounds good but doesn’t make much sense.” We need to know that Father James is keeping his chin up and taking it all in stride because, otherwise, we would never be able to take this journey with him. At one point, Freddie (Domhnall Gleeson), one of James’ former students who’s now locked up for killing and cannibalizing a young girl, plaintively asks the priest: “God has to understand me because he made me, right?” After a beat, Father James replies, “If God can’t understand you, no one can.” The dark streak of humor functions in the same way, reassuring us that things in Father James’ world are never quite as grim as they seem to be, even when our heart tells us that they’re actually much worse.

As with The Guard, McDonagh populates his film with a host of impressively individualistic characters: stellar actors like Dylan Moran (of Black Books fame), Chris O’Dowd, David Wilmot, Aidan Gillen, Gary Lydon and even good, old M. Emmet Walsh (looking positively ancient but sounding just as great as ever) all show up and help weave the intricately intertwined tapestry that forms the fabric of the film. Kelly Reilly does some great work as James’ estranged daughter and I must admit to rather loving Killian Scot’s ridiculously over-the-top performance as Inspector Stanton’s gay, tough-guy lover: it’s a blustery, obnoxious performance with just enough underlying sadness and vulnerability to sell the whole thing, part and parcel.

Towering over everything like some sort of enormous, cassock-clad, bearded Colossus of Rhodes, however, is Brendan Gleeson. Easily one of the best actors working in film today, Gleeson seems to spit out amazing performances like this in his sleep: he’s like the male, Irish Meryl Streep, completely incapable of phoning anything in or giving any less than 1000%. Gleeson isn’t acting: he IS Father James, from head to foot, inhabiting the character so completely that any notion of mimicry goes out the window. There’s not one moment in Gleeson’s performance, one single iota, that ever hits as anything less than completely authentic and genuine. It’s a heartbreaking performance for a number of reasons but the main two are pretty simple: Father James seems like a genuinely nice person and Gleeson brings him to life in a way that makes us know and feel for him. We don’t need to take a side, one way or the other, to feel the tremendous tragedy, the complete unfairness of Father James’ fate: Gleeson makes us feel it because we don’t have a choice.

Craft-wise, Calvary looks and sounds amazing: cinematographer Larry Smith, who also shot Nicholas Winding Refn’s Bronson (2008) and Only God Forgives (2013), turns the emerald greens and azure blues of the Irish countryside into one of the film’s main characters. There’s an impressive sense of space and isolation that perfectly meshes with Father James’ own “man without a country” status in the town and some of the sweeping vistas are so gorgeous that they resemble something out of a travel program. The score and sound design are also expertly realized: one of my very favorite scenes, ever, has to be the one where Father James prepares to leave town, set to the tune of Roger Whittaker’s soaring “New World in the Morning.” The scene is such a perfect synthesis of song and visual, so emotionally wonderful, that it, literally, took my breath away…even thinking back on it now, I find myself getting a little emotional, which is surely the mark of an indelible moment.

All in all, Calvary stands as yet another absolute home-run for McDonagh, a filmmaker who has quickly established himself as one of the most formidable around. Truth be told, I still find it hard to believe that this is only his second film: quality like this should be the result of a lifetime spend honing one’s craft, not the span of four or five short years. From beginning to end, Calvary is a nearly flawless character study and one of the very finest films of this year (or many others, for that matter). For anyone lamenting the lack of quality, “adult” entertainment, look no further than Calvary: it just doesn’t get much better than this, folks.

10/26/14 (Part Two): That Knock At the Door

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31 Days of Halloween, cinema, co-writers, couples, death of a child, dramas, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, flashbacks, forgiveness, Gabriel Cowan, gas masks, ghosts, guilt, Haunter, home invasion, horror films, indie films, isolated estates, isolation, John Suits, Milo Ventimiglia, Movies, multiple writers, Sara Paxton, Sarah Shahi, Static, The Others, Todd Levin, twist ending, William Mapother, writer-director

Jonathan (Milo Ventimiglia) and Addie (Sarah Shahi) can’t seem to buy a break. First, they lose their young son in some sort of undisclosed tragedy. The terrible event rocks the very foundations of their marriage, as often happens, but the bad times don’t stop there. There are also hints at problems with infidelity in the relationship, just as vague and ill-defined as the tragedy that stole away their child but definitely there. The couple have retreated to the isolation of a remote estate in order to work on their marriage, only to have their peace disrupted when a mysterious young woman (Sara Paxton), clad in a parka, pounds on their front door. It seems that the young woman is being pursued by a mysterious group of assailants, all wearing gas masks, apparently with the intent to cause her grievous injury. After the couple lets the frantic “guest” into their home, they find themselves under siege by the outside group, as a desperate struggle for survival unfolds. Talk about heapin’ on the misery!

For most of its run-time, Todd Levin’s Static (2012) (which features a whopping three screenwriters, including Levin) is a modest, somber little home invasion flick that breaks absolutely no new ground and does nothing particularly interesting with the sub-genre. At a certain point, however, the filmmakers throw in a twist that sends the film off in another direction entirely. From that point on, the film becomes a different, albeit equally familiar, type of movie, leading to a resolution that should be overly familiar to anyone who’s ever seen one of these types of films. I won’t spoil the “twist” but will note that its ultimate revelation made me sigh aloud: I’d recently seen another, much better, film that did basically the same thing and this was like trying to read the smudged Xerox of a fourth-generation photocopy.

The film is well-made and features a capable, if small, cast: for the majority of the film, the only actors that we see are Ventimiglia, Shahi and Paxton. Ventimiglia, who’s recently been making quite the name for himself in genre efforts like The Divide (2011) and Kiss of the Damned (2012), is his usual brand of emotionless cool mixed with the occasional fiery outburst, sort of a much less interesting variation on Mark Wahlberg. Shahi, for her part, gets a few nice emotional beats but there’s very little chemistry between her and Ventimiglia: we can buy that the couple have hit a rough patch in their marriage but there doesn’t appear to have been much spark there in the best of times, either. Paxton, know for genre fare like The Last House on the Left (2009), The Innkeepers (2011) and Shark Night 3D (2011), does fine with what she’s given but the character of Rachel really only exists as a punchline, as it were, to the film’s main “twist.” Beyond that plot mechanism, her character really doesn’t have much of a purpose, which sort of renders her a little moot.

All in all, Static is decent enough but wears out its welcome fairly quickly. The look of the “bad guys,” complete with gas masks, is a good one, although it still manages to unnecessarily reference the whole “masked people trying to break in” angle of films like Them (2006), You’re Next (2011) and The Purge (2013). For the most part, the film is a kitchen-sink drama about a marriage collapsing, intermittently “spiced” up with the home invasion angle. It’s a tactic that could have worked, ala You’re Next, but everything here just feels kind of cheap and reductive. Ultimately, Static is thoroughly competent, if somewhat depressingly so.

1/26/14: 90 Minutes in Purgatory

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action films, Alistair Little, cinema, drama, Film, Five Minutes of Heaven, forgiveness, Irish films, Irish Republic, James Nesbitt, Liam Neeson, Mark Ryder, Movies, Northern Ireland, Oliver Hirschbiegel, Protestant vs Catholic, reconciliation, retribution, revenge, UVF

Sometimes, you can have the very best intentions and still fall short. You may set out to help someone, for all the right reasons, only to have everything backfire completely. You might attempt to atone for a past transgression, only to re-stoke flames of hatred that might, otherwise, have been forever snuffed. You might even attempt to make a film that deals in highly personal issues of redemption, forgiveness and hatred while simultaneously showcasing pulse-pounding action. Five Minutes of Heaven strives for many things but, unfortunately, falls just as short on many of them.

Five Minutes of Heaven is a fictional film that’s actually inspired by real events, although the bulk of the film still dwells in the land of supposition and “what-if.” The movie begins in 1975 with young Alistair Little, a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force, in Northern Ireland. The UVF were a staunchly anti-Catholic, anti-Irish Republic group that patrolled Northern Ireland during the worst part of the age-old British/Irish conflict. In retaliation for a perceived threat by Catholic workers against a Protestant worker, Little finds and kills a Catholic man, Jimmy Griffin, in front of his younger brother, Joe. Alistair ends up serving time in prison, where he seems to have come out a changed, repentant man. Joe survived a childhood where he was unfairly blamed by his mother for his older brother’s death and made to suffer every day under her emotional and physical abuse. His only dream has been the “five minutes of Heaven” that he would experience as he killed Alistair Little. Thirty-odd years later, Joe just may get his chance as a TV crew facilitates a meeting between Alistair and Joe, under the guise of promoting a reconciliation between the two men. Alistair is cautious yet seems to genuinely desire a chance to begin the healing process. Joe, for his part, just can’t keep his hands off that sharp knife in his pocket. Which notion will prevail: forgiveness or vengeance?

As stated earlier, Five Minutes of Heaven has noble, if rather scattered intentions. There is some genuinely good work being done here, especially by Liam Neeson as modern-day Alistair. Neeson brings much of the quiet reserve that he’s noted for to the role, somehow making a former terrorist into something of a penitent monk. It’s not the easiest transition to swallow but Neeson really sells it. There’s a notable difference between the brash and arrogant young Alistair (played quite capably by Borgia’s Mark Ryder in a part that amounts to little more than a cameo: he’s so good that I wish we’d spent more time in the past) and the quietly religious older Alistair.

James Nesbitt, as modern-day Joe, is good but he has the tendency to play everything too aggressively, too unhinged. It reminds one of the criticisms lobbed at Jack Nicholson for his portrayal of Jack Torrance in The Shining: he started off unhinged, so the slippery slope to madness isn’t very steep. Similarly, Nesbitt plays Joe as such a damaged, fractured, spastic creature that it’s difficult to get a sense of anything from him except for pain. Every line is delivered with either clenched-teeth, ready-to-explode anger or an actual outburst, a few of which are powerful enough but lose impact through repetition. There’s something of a Nicholas Cage quality to Nesbitt’s performance, which doesn’t necessarily work to the film’s benefit. We’re allowed to see Alistair cycle through several emotions: sorrow, anger, regret, hesitation, confusion, serenity. For Joe, however, we only get pain, anger, regret and fear. This can, of course, be chalked-up to Joe’s miserable childhood and single-minded desire to kill Alistair: all well and good. Nesbitt’s constant red-lining of the emotions, however, leaves no room whatsoever for emotional building or resonance: it’s either flat or outraged.

Structurally, the film makes a few odd choices that tend to detract from the overall package, particularly involving confusing voice-overs (at one point, I thought Joe was actually talking, only to realize it was the voice-over, which promptly segued back into actual dialogue: needlessly confusing. The strangest aspect of the film, however, is the abrupt transition from emotional drama to action film in the film’s climax. It’s a scenario that the film seems to have been building up to for some time but, when it comes, the moment feels entirely out-of-place and strange, like a scene lifted from another film (possibly one of Neeson’s Taken films) entirely. That the film manages to end in a manner more consistent with the dramatic angle than the action one only further compounds the situation and makes the climatic fisticuffs that much odder and, to be frank, sillier.

Five Minutes of Heaven is a decent film with performances that range from the very good (Neeson and Ryder) to the very presentational (Nesbitt and Jill Crawford as a rather bizarre makeup assistant who functions as a sounding board for Joe’s rants as they await the arrival of Alistair). I can certainly appreciate the sentiment but can’t help feeling that a much more interesting film, a film that I really wanted to see, was left back in 1975 with all of those misguided young men patrolling the night and shooting each other for reasons even they can’t figure out. That sounds like a pretty great film, to be honest: as it stands, Five Minutes of Heaven is just a decent one.