CAPSULE: Calvary (2014, Dir. John Michael McDonagh)

As far as black comedies go there are varying shades of black and various shades of comedy. John Michael McDonagh's Ireland set priest-threatener, Calvary, goes for the extremes on both counts. Its sexual abuse spurred, suicide focussed, domestic violence battering, capitalist malaise ridden narrative is about as black as black can get. That's all well and good, and interesting enough, it is just that it doesn't sit so well with McDonagh's raspingly dry comedy, which tends to miss its marks amongst the difficult tone.Much of the comedy is so tarred by Calvary's pitch blackness that it is difficult to see the humour in it at all.

Brendan Gleeson fares best in the confusion. He brings his usual gruff artistry to what is by far the most developed character in the piece, the small town's resident priest, Father James Lavelle. Gleeson is a fascinating focal point for Calvary and not merely because of the sturdiness of his performance. The film opens with an anonymous exchange in the confessional, a revelation of child sexual abuse and a death threat. Fr. Lavelle isn't the perpetrator, quite the opposite, he's an innocent. There is, according to Fr. Lavelle's unrepentant interlocutor, no point in killing a guilty priest. And so he sets the deadline. Next Sunday. Fr. Lavelle gets a week to set his affairs in order before his threatened end.

McDonagh's screenplay isn't afraid to wallow in the mire of modern day popular ethics, or lack thereof. Calvary calls into question the veracity of the church's moral compass and whether the institution is a worthy guide if its practitioners struggle to believe on the one hand and touch up young children with the other. Yet, outside Gleeson's anchoring presence, McDonagh's social landscape is populated with flighty, insubstantial clowns. The impressive cast put in decent performances but there is only so much the likes of Chris O'Dowd, Aiden Gillen and Dylan Moran can do under McDonagh's oppressive framework. They find some laughs, even if they do tend towards the unsettling.

The questions Calvary asks are no doubt pertinent, especially at home in the Irish Catholic heartland, though I'm not sure that McDonagh's misanthropic, rudderless version of modern theological soul searching gets to the heart of the issue at hand. Is religion still relevant in a world that has moved on in all but practice? I can't help but feel McDonagh may have got a better answer if he'd put a bit more grunt into the investigation. And maybe stuck with the drama.

★★★

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