UNITED STATES
The New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI and ROSS DOUTHAT AUGUST 7, 2014
Welcome to The Moviegoers, an occasional new series in which the Op-Ed columnists Frank Bruni and Ross Douthat banter about movies, pop culture, television and other real-world distractions. From 1993-95, Frank was a movie critic for The Detroit Free Press, and he has written frequently on culture for The New York Times Magazine and for the Arts & Leisure section. Ross is the film critic for National Review and frequently writes about film and TV on his Times blog.
Frank Bruni: Ross, maybe because you’d told me that you were going to roll with the crowds and buy a ticket for “Guardians of the Galaxy,” or maybe because I’d done “Godzilla” and the “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” and it was time to swerve in the opposite direction, I went and checked out “Calvary” the other night.
My summer moviegoing tends to cling to the poles. I hop aboard one of the loud, frenetic, big-budget blockbusters that supposedly define the season, then I sneak away to one of the quiet, independent movies that utterly defy it. I binge and I purge. And I’d like to circle back to the binges, but first: “Calvary.”
Have you seen it? I think you should. I think you will: You’re Catholic, and it’s a serious look at the tattered repute of the Roman Catholic Church today. I spent many years writing about the crisis of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy and long ago published a book on the topic, and that crisis is the context and starting point of “Calvary,” whose hero (played by the Irish actor Brendan Gleeson) is a priest in the midst of a casually and sometimes caustically disobedient flock.
Most of the people in his seaside village in Ireland seem to feel no intimidation around him, no obligation even to feign rectitude. To several of them he’s a relic, a curiosity, a prompt for mockery, a magnet for anger. In one subtly devastating scene, a father finds his daughter walking and talking alone with the priest on an isolated country road and yanks the girl away, as if removing her from the clutches of a predator. It’s a reminder that the casualties of the crisis include many good priests who work under a cloud of suspicion, trying to recapture a trust that was once a given and is now a luxury.
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