UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph (UK)
By Jenny McCartney
13 Apr 2014
15 cert, 101 min
Dir: John Michael McDonagh. Starring: Brendan Gleeson, Chris O’Dowd, Kelly Reilly, Dylan Moran, Aidan Gillen
Few actors have such a distinctively grounding presence as Brendan Gleeson, an auburn-haired native of Dublin with an impressively broad and stocky frame. He can anchor films that might otherwise have disappeared on the wings of their own conceits. Most memorably, perhaps, In Bruges (2008), Martin McDonagh’s film in which Gleeson played an older, quieter hitman struggling to wrestle his junior partner, a frantic fast-talking Colin Farrell, back to earth.
In Calvary – this time by the writer-director John Michael McDonagh, Martin’s brother – Gleeson plays a priest, Father James Lavelle, a thoughtful but morally muscular man who is well respected in his parish.
He is visited in confession one Sunday morning by a parishioner who informs him, in blunt and searing terms, that he was abused by a paedophile priest from the age of seven, from which he has suffered continuous torments, and that he now intends to wreak revenge by killing “a good priest”, Father Lavelle. The prospective assassin even makes a date for it.
Gleeson’s character thinks he knows who the parishioner is; the audience does not, and the film introduces a cast of bitter and troubled characters – each of whom, one feels, could suddenly reveal murderous intent. The arrangement is heavily theatrical, and yet the satire on the darkest extremes in modern Ireland retains a sharp and immediate bite.
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