UNITED STATES
Philadelphia Inquirer
STEVEN REA, INQUIRER MOVIE COLUMNIST AND CRITIC
POSTED: Sunday, August 3, 2014
It’s the picture of innocence: a country priest in billowing cassock, strolling a rural road in Ireland’s windswept West, encountering a young girl, chatting with her about this, about that.
But then her father pulls up in a car, and angrily summons her. With an utterly vilifying look, he warns the cleric off.
“That scene encapsulates everything the movie is about,” says Brendan Gleeson, the Irish actor who plays Father James, a good priest in a bad world, in John Michael McDonagh’s stormy tale of reckoning, Calvary.
“It’s a powerful, troubling, funny moment,” says Gleeson, a familiar face in big Hollywood pictures (Edge of Tomorrow, the Harry Potters) and small British and Irish independents alike. “You can’t even talk to a child anymore. I mean, it’s not merely priests – I think any man, at this point, has to think twice about talking to children on the road.
“There’s something fundamentally broken when that’s the way things are.”
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