Calvary
By Ian Brockway
Taking a sinister cue from his brother, the playwright Martin McDonagh, director John Michael McDonagh steers this tense and thoughtful study of an Irish priest, played by the oft-recognizable Brendan Gleeson.
In “Calvary,” Father James (Gleeson) is a good priest in a small town. He is patient with most everyone. During confession, an unknown man tells him of sexual abuse that he endured as a child under the hands of another man of the cloth, now several years deceased.
“I’ll kill you,” the man states flatly, “but not now. Get your affairs together.”
Father James is stupefied.
The modest priest tries to push it from his mind, and counsel throughout each day but cannot.
He immerses himself in work, visiting one quirky character after another: a bumbling, self deprecating butcher (Chris O’Dowd), a non believing doctor (Aidan Gillen) a ladies’ man (Isaach De Bankolé) a dishonest financier (Dylan Moran) and a monotone bishop (David Mcsavage)
He is at a loss.
Father James is summoned to the aide of his troubled daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly) who has recently attempted suicide and he does his best.
Why did this declaration occur to him and who is the man?
He walks to each visit with large, calm and deliberate steps. The huge pea soup green cliffs of Ireland stand impassively aloof in sweeping Kubrickian closeups.
One night during a gun discussion at a pub, the church is incinerated.
Father James visits the local policeman, a known hedonist.
He borrows a gun, but silently refuses to use such things, although remaining philosophically fascinated.
Everywhere he goes, Father James is goaded and coerced for no solid reason, other than to get the better of him. Every person seems under seduction by lascivious, violent and petty forces.
Father James’s only solace is a series of talks at the bedside of an ailing writer (M. Emmett Walsh).
The tension of the film is palpable throughout with echoes of McDonagh’s own brother of course, but also possessing something of “The American” and “High Noon.” Though these influences are clearly in evidence, the flashes of crackling humor combined with its smooth sandstone-like apprehension is unique to this director as seen in his previous outing “The Guard.”
While the acting of Brendan Gleeson is nearly mythic in its deadpan stoicism, Dylan Moran deserves high mention, too, as a pasty, apathetic, juvenile but oddly insightful man with nothing to live for.
Debauchery and sadistic mischief hover before this pious man like a tri-horned cumulus of Pazazu, or a meteorological devil. James is stripped of action and thought as the disturbing events unfold.
Although the story moves like a tight, punchy thriller, there are also meditative and pensive passages that will provoke multiple sighs. This is a film of theological thought and an ecumenical character study just as much as a suspense tale of sorts. And, in terms of an analysis of the priestly temperament under legions of doubt, this is a subtle and sound film with an authentic collar under its frock.
As threatening as “Calvary” is, it is no superfluous adrenalin tale; it is full of authenticity and rich in rites.
Brendan Gleeson as the Everyman father is no mere cartoon, but a human questioner whose somewhat immobile yet surprised face also carries with it a sad eventuality. Ultimately, his expression mirrors the Irish landscape in its unending permanence, absent of all commentary or solution.
Get On Up
Tate Taylor’s (The Help) ultra-Pop presentation of the musician James Brown is nothing less than virtuosic, with all the elements of a graphic novel while giving the highlights of Brown’s life with a sense of danger, magic and festivity.
This is the larger than life man and as played by Chadwick Boseman (42), nothing is spared with a performance that very nearly reaches a blood-boiling incarnation.
Director Taylor has the daring verve to offer his biography as a series of moving collages that puts Brown’s adventure into graphic illustration, with each vignette more poignant and humorous than the last.
Here he is in a helicopter in Vietnam under attack (Boom! Boom! Boom! ). Here he is onstage rising as if conjured by sorcery from the chants of U.S. Marines. At the conclusion of most every segment, the adult Brown is brought back in the body of a child to witness his violent origins where events were often volatile and scary.
His mother (Viola Davis) was often beaten in full view of him and at one point he sees his father firing a gun at her.
The mother leaves.
A young Brown passively enters a splintered and crooked church. Loud screeches and whirling bodies move past, while an intimidating high- hatted man yelps a manic gospel in the center of the floor, his body locked in a spastic charade, while his long, pointed and curving fingernails indicate eerie motions of the vampire and warlock, fear and awe.
Brown is a spacey, space-traveler, wide eyed, wise and open, forever taking refuge in the beat of sound that covers him like a cape.
The guns of war become the punches of his father which in turn become indistinguishable from the sounds of drum and horn.
Through it all, James Brown ages and performs as a perpetually running engine, never stopping, going, going, going, on and on and on. His iconic kneel onstage soon becoming the universal gesture for all of us, men women and children, shaken by war, racism and subjugation.
Yet, this poetical, lysergic man of locomotion is far from a saint; he sometimes transforms into a selfish and angry egotist, terribly smacking the woman he loves, Dee Dee Jenkins (Jill Scott).
The story doesn’t shy away from Brown’s devils and thankfully so, when many music biographies are ultimately sugary and smoothed over.
The film is as vibrant and jumpy as its subject. Brown is shown as a passive divining rod, coming to life through the ghost of music like one possessed.
Brown is endlessly pursued by either cops or the mournful body of his mother and these two ingredients prophecy no good.
Whether by spirit or fate, it is a wondrous thing that this man was able to charm his feet and make power out of his high-hopping and maternal malevolence.
Above all, “Get On Up” highlights the power of music to combat pain, domestic violence and racial hatred. James Brown is an amphetamine angel and a guerrilla soldier with groove, bringing positive and chimerical energies together when no politicians could.
Both his Aunt Honey (Octavia Spencer) and the one time line cook, Little Richard (Brandon Mychal Smith), saw it written on the scroll of Space that James was going to become famous with a planetary pompadour as The Hardest Working Man in Show Business, fueled by Coca-Cola and other uppers.
The featured music here is as enjoyable as the imagery, full bodied with rhythm and joy.
Chadwick Boseman in the title role, is a man of mean motion here, equally spaced out and sweating, emitting singed embers of perspiration.
This is truly James Brown in the flesh of a different body. To see “Get On Up” is to witness a pair of famous and quivering shoulders hunched in the act of repossessing a well known purple-laced cloak of silver lamé.
Write Ian at [email protected]
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