IRELAND
The Guardian (UK)
Catherine Shoard
The Guardian, Tuesday 8 April 2014
There’s apocalypse in the air the day I go to Dublin. In the driving wind and rain, traffic seizes up, umbrellas crumble, and my map turns to pulp. Later, planes won’t land and lights won’t work. Thank heavens, then, for Brendan Gleeson, holed up in the basement of a hotel near parliament. He grips my hand and grins, massive and unflappable, as the courtyard outside the window seems to explode.
For all his smiling, though, it seems Gleeson isn’t in the most reassuring mood: the apocalypse, it seems, isn’t just swirling around Dublin. “The whole world is in cataclysmic disillusionment,” he says, pouring his fizzy water. “There’s a sense of grieving going on for the loss of clarity over what’s acceptable and what’s not. People don’t trust in the concept of goodness, or in the authorities defining it for us. Religion in general has been dismantled in western Europe. All systems – socialist or capitalist – are crashing.”
The time is right, in other words, for Calvary, Gleeson’s new film, premiered the night before for the home crowd. “There seemed to be a pleasant sense of shock in the room,” he says. “A pleasant whiff of trauma. The reaction tends to be muted – you don’t get standing ovations. But you know it’s working.”
Calvary is the first film to face up to the sexual-abuse scandals that have so tainted the Catholic church lately. Its genius lies in doing this upside down – by querying the anger as much as channelling it. Gleeson plays Father James, a good priest in a west-coast town riven with sin and spite. In the first scene, he takes confession from a man who’s known to him but anonymous to the audience. The man tells him he was repeatedly raped as a boy by a priest, who’s since died. So next Sunday, he’s going to murder blameless Father James as an enforced act of penance. “I’m going to kill you, Father,” says the man, “because you’ve done nothing wrong.”
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