Calvary

Benbulbin

Benbulbin

CALVARY                  A-          
Ireland  Great Britain  (100 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  John Michael McDonagh     Official Facebook

Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-diggers’ toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong.
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.

—Second stanza, Under Ben Bulben by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), a poem addressing his own mortality, from Last Poems, 1939

I’ve always felt there's something inherently psychopathic about joining the army in peace time, as far as I’m concerned people join the army to find out what its like to kill someone.  I hardly think that’s an inclination that should be encouraged in modern society, do you?          —Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson) 

This is a film unlike anything else seen in awhile, perhaps ever, as one needs to be psychically prepared for the metaphysical seriousness of tone, a modern morality play where despite the religious subject matter wrapped in Catholic doctrine, this plays out like a bleak existential western, a morbid take on HIGH NOON (1952), where one man alone takes on the forces of evil, unable to use the powers of the church or God to stop the inevitable doom from happening.  Named after the site where Christ was crucified, the film opens in the confession booth as a priest, Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson), hears a man threaten to kill him in one week’s time, naming the date and place of his murder.  The film then recounts the events of the week, day by day, leading up to that fateful hour.  This is as far from an action film as one gets, taking the audience completely off-guard, as the film relies instead upon the expository writing of the author, the writer/director of the hilariously offbeat The Guard (2011), also featuring a magnificent performance by Gleeson, but this is about as hushed and toned down as films can be, as the priest makes his usual rounds visiting various people in the community unannounced, where the entire film is a character study that consists of these intensely personal conversations, becoming a slowly unraveling philosophical treatise on man’s fate.  The Catholic church is as much the target as Father James, as the wounded parishioner was sexually abused by a priest from the ages of seven to twelve, recalling the horrendous pain he was forced to endure that has never left him, carrying the hurt and anguish around with him where his only consolation, since the offending priest is dead, is to target a good priest.  Father James, by all accounts, is well-liked and respected by all, where he has a worldly intelligence, as he came late to the calling, only after overcoming a drinking problem and ending in the death of his wife.  Adding to his own personal shame, his troubled daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly) has been the victim of failed romances, the most recent resulting in a suicide attempt.  While the priest is the film’s centerpiece, she’s his able assistant, where the two make a remarkably astute pair, going on long walks together, recovering what they can from their own damaged lives.   

McDonagh, along with his brother Martin, one of the best known living Irish playwrights who wrote and directed In Bruges (2008), intends this to be the second installment of a Suicide Trilogy, all starring Brendon Gleeson, beginning with The Guard featuring Gleeson as a policeman schooling an American FBI agent (Don Cheadle) on local Irish police procedures while tracking down a drug smuggling ring, while in the third, THE LAME SHALL ENTER FIRST, Gleeson will play a paraplegic ex-policeman attempting to solve the murder of a friend whose death has been overlooked by the carelessness of the police.  As an older, bearded man in a wheelchair, expect Gleeson’s character to spew vitriol at every “able-bodied” human being.  So while the first and third appear to be laced with acerbic black comedy, CALVARY is one of the more profoundly contemplative films of the year, yet also feels like a mournful death march, similar to the atmospheric mood of Jim Jarmusch’s DEAD MAN (1995), complete with similar philosophical examinations.  The film is a full frontal attack on the Catholic church, who turned a blind eye to the Catholic sexual abuse scandal in Ireland, an epidemic of sexual abuse cases by Catholic priests in Ireland (Republic), where more than 35,000 Irish teenagers and children from Catholic-run orphanages or reformatories were abused by priests from the 1930’s until their discovery in the early 1990’s, not to mention priests from prominently renowned churches to the Magdalene asylum.  Despite thousands of witnesses coming forward, including a 9-year government commission to investigate the allegations, few offenders have been prosecuted, but this hasn’t in any way altered the Church’s practice of accepting money.  Because of the public notoriety of the church sex scandal around the world, it is almost universally accepted that no female nuns come from Ireland, Western Europe, or even North America anymore.  While the ramifications of this detestable scandal, almost invisible within the church itself, is a central theme of the film, where the suggestion seems to be life goes on, so let’s get on with our lives.  But some scars never heal, where they fester and only grow worse over time, with the act of revenge becoming the only viable response that matters, that gives meaning to every last breath, as all else has already died long ago.  It is in this anguishing spiritual abyss that CALVARY resides, a deeply introspective film that attempts to examine the meaning of faith in a faithless world, or find value in hope only after all hope is lost.     

As much as any Western country, Ireland has certainly had its faith tested in recent years, crawling out from under the absolutism of the Catholic Church, where money and modernity have been equally elusive.  Shot by Larry Smith, the film makes exquisite use of the rugged Irish coastline with seemingly endless rolling waves and the picturesque rural locale of County Sligo, including the looming omnipresence of Benbulben lurking off in the distance, a large rock formation in the Dartry Mountains, an area sometimes called “Yeats Country,” as the poet spent part of his youth there and is buried nearby.  The stunning beauty of these exterior geographical locations only heightens an interior examination of the characters, where this is a sin and redemption movie with Father James spending what could potentially be his final week making unannounced visits to any number of damaged individuals as he consoles a grief-stricken widow (Marie-Josée Croze) whose husband dies senselessly in a car crash while touring the region, an aging writer (M. Emmett Walsh) with a love for Hoagy Carmichael and American jazz of the 20’s and 30’s who begins to have contemplations about his impending death, an attractive butcher’s wife Veronica (Orla O’Rourke) who recently left her husband Jack (Chris O’Dowd) after sporting a black eye, though he blames it on an African boyfriend (Isaach de Bankolé) who takes offense to the priest’s prying insinuations.  Perhaps most pathetic is a retired stock trader Michael (Dylan Moran) who has earned a fortune, recently purchasing a fabulously expensive mansion without his wife and child who left him, leaving him to stew in his own self-imposed existential emptiness where life has lost all meaning, while the creepiest is a visit to the prison seeing a former student, Freddie Joyce (Gleeson’s own son Domhnall Gleeson), a convicted serial killer sentenced to life, as Ireland has no death penalty, who reminds the priest that he’s also one of God’s creations, wondering if God could understand him, to which Father James judiciously responds, “If God can’t understand you, no one can.” 

Throughout these visits, he continues to interact with his daughter Fiona, who felt doubly betrayed both by the death of her mother and then the absence of her father when he left to join the priesthood, where this visit is an attempt to heal their wounds.  This is a dark and somber drama, thoughtful and quietly moving throughout, showcasing an acerbic wit and black humor, especially since an ugly nature permeates throughout this country town, with scorn and resentment filling the air, where any one of them could be guilty.  They are a sorry bunch filled with the devil’s mischief, deserving of the Father’s pity, yet they hold him in utter contempt, as nobody believes in anything anymore.  A brooding study of human nature where Father James is thwarted at every turn, the film slowly and deliberately moves towards that inevitable confrontation between the forces of good and evil, resulting in a vividly unsparing climax that leaves nothing to the imagination.  “I was one of the lucky ones!  There’s bodies buried back there,” where the tortuous pain of the afflicted parishioner bares its ugly soul with the volcanic fury of insufferable pain, as the film revisits the same places over the end credits without the presence of people, losing all sense of humanity, where the stark emptiness is a jolt to the system, especially accompanied by hauntingly transcendent Guaraní harp music from Paraguay, Los Chiriguanos - Subo - YouTube (“Subo” I Climb, 3:01), where Los Chiriguanos are two men from the tribe of Chirigua that have existed in central South America since long before the Spaniards came in 1527, who themselves have suffered their own indignities, yet produce such heavenly music.  The common thread throughout is carried by the good intentions of mortal men, much like the country priest in Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne) (1951), whose persistent effort to help build a better understanding in the world brings the eternal into ordinary day to day experiences, which may as well be the grace of God.   

The Bachelor Weekend

THE BACHELOR WEEKEND           C                    

(aka:  The Stag)

Ireland  (94 mi)  2013  d:  John Butler  

This little single-celled organism is getting married to my sister.     

—The Machine (Peter McDonald)

Ireland doesn’t produce a lot of movies for export, which is surprising in a nation that reveres writers, often elevating them to the status of rock stars, yet still, despite the presence of the Irish Film Board, which provides funds for the development and production of Irish films, very few ever see the light of day internationally.  Perhaps best known are the works of John Michael McDonagh, writer and director of The Guard (2011), and his brother Martin, an Irish playwright who wrote and directed In Bruges (2008) and Seven Psychopaths (2012), each featuring Brendan Gleeson and/or Colin Farrell.  John Butler is an aspiring Irish writer, having moved to Los Angeles in 2006 and written a novel, The Tenderloin, also co-writing a currently running Irish television comedy show, Your Bad Self (2010 – present) before writing and directing this film, which will likely win him few accolades.  At times dreadful, at other times ridiculously absurd, this film is built around a wedding about to happen between Fionnan (Hugh O’Connor) and Ruth (Amy Huberman), where the groom, a theater set designer, is getting too involved in the tiny details of planning the wedding, even designing a small-scale model of what he has in mind, which causes the wedding planner some grief, as it’s hard to match or reproduce right down to the last detail.  Ruth finds his obsessive need for managing the minutia counterproductive and enlists his best man, Davin (Andrew Scott), to arrange a stag party where they can hike the great outdoors of the Irish countryside, turning into a camping trip over a weekend just to get him out of the house.  While it’s clear none of his friends are really the outdoors type, as they’re more of a highbrow group that feels perfectly comfortable dwelling on the details of middle class materialism, they nonetheless convince Fionnan to let himself go out on one final fling with the boys before losing his bachelorhood status.  While the title of the film upon release was THE STAG, once the movie arrived in America it was quickly changed to a more generic title, typical of Ellis Island immigration practices where foreign sounding names were Americanized.  Who knows what was so confusing about the original title? 

Opening with two friends, Fionnan and Davin, playing a cozy little game of backgammon, Davin goes through a litany of excuses for why he can’t commit to various girlfriends, using every known physical flaw as an excuse for why this would never work out, never realizing the degree of pretentious arrogance on display for even considering such a process of elimination.  Little did we know human shortsightedness would become an overall theme for the film, as a tightly knit group of friends, all with the same general styles and tastes, where casting routine judgmental opinions about others is standard and comes effortlessly, so it shouldn’t come as any big surprise that the joke is eventually on them.  It doesn’t bode well for the future of the marriage when Ruth insists that the group allow her brother to tag along, a loud and unlikable jackass known only as The Machine (Peter McDonald), someone that drives Fionnan up the wall.  Despite their best efforts to ditch him, Ruth gives him directions to where they’re meeting, so when he shows up and joins the ranks with the hearty expression, “Konnichiwa, fucksticks!” they all tremble at the thought of spending the weekend with the likes of him.  Nonetheless, using a broad range of crudeness and lewd jokes, with plenty of rude profanity, The Machine gets in the face of each and every one of them, creating a series of confrontations and awkward moments in the great outdoors.  When it turns out the guy is a psychopath with little concern for the regard for others, all they do is cower in response, becoming an outdoor trek with a bully and five “Hobbits,” as he likes to call them, anything to undermine their smug air of moral superiority.  The problem is how easily they can all be stereotyped, the groom, the best man, gay couple, the guy that hates U2 (considered the epitome of being anti-Irish), and the psychopath, where over the course of the next day or two, they all grate on each other’s nerves, rubbed raw by the constant irritating presence of The Machine (no explanation for how he picked up that name).  

Shot in Dublin, Wicklow, and Galway, the film has a chatty and combative back to nature theme with a couple of blundering fools creeping through the back country, where they’re constantly sniveling and whining about one thing or another, where the feeling is the tide has turned against them, led by the reckless acts of The Machine who undermines their every step with his own callous macho braggadocio, with none of them standing up to him, so it all grows tiresome after awhile, yet we’re stuck with them and their juvenile nonsense through the duration of the movie.  It’s a bit of an uncomfortable mess, but someone had the foresight to bring along some naturally grown ecstasy, taken one evening around the campfire, when the lads eventually break out into song.  It’s all pleasant enough mainstream entertainment until Davin blurts out the startling revelation that he’s always been in love with the girl his best friend is marrying, brilliantly expressed in his achingly heartfelt rendition of “On Raglan Road,” Luke Kelly Raglan Road - YouTube (4:17), a song also poignantly featured in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges.  Out of endless mediocrity comes a moment of true inspiration, as it’s the first (and only) moment in the entire film that might actually fall into the realm of “human,” drawing the audience into his dilemma, where there is finally someone to care about.  The moment vanishes in an instant, however, as the boys tear off all their clothes and run blissfully naked through the woods searching for some lost lake that they can never find, instead getting lost and freezing their tails off under a bundle of leaves without so much as a hint of where they are.  By the time The Machine leads them all safely back home, like a Shakespearean Midsummer Night’s Dream spell, they’ve suddenly been recalibrated into new men, where all the petty grievances have been set aside, all the resentments gone, and they’ve somehow been wielded into responsible adults, where The Machine is no longer a blithering idiot spouting endless insults and profanity, but the glue that holds them all together, actually adding a touch of sweetness, taking a formulaic and well-worn buddy theme, throwing all manner of humiliation and contentious discord at them, finally bringing the curtain down with a rousing and unifying rendition of U2’s “One” U2 - One - YouTube (5:21) at the wedding ceremony.    

Seven Psychopaths

SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS                   B-                   

Great Britain  (110 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Martin McDonagh            Official site

Of the three films released by the McDonagh brothers, including Martin’s In Bruges (2008) and John Michael’s The Guard (2011), this is easily the weakest of the three, another black comedy that takes pains with the audience to explain the multiple ideas in conceiving a story, that becomes more about the process of writing, digressing into multiple side stories, always feeling experimental and incomplete, never really feeling much like an actual movie.  Part of the problem is the overly self-conscious nature of the film, a film about the making of a movie, which stops every so often and shares with the audience where it wants to go before it goes there, a device that often does not work.  This may work better in a theater production, where on different nights the actors might actually change the story and use the same clues to different outcomes.  But in a movie, first and foremost there needs to be sustained suspense, dramatic conflict and tension, which is all but absent when the story continually stops as the characters examine the choices to be made, always discussing the possible outcomes before they happen, so when they do, it’s not much of a surprise.  The technique of exposing the writing as the film is progressing is a difficult undertaking, often interfering in the overall interest, where some will find this continually annoying.  Perhaps the best example of this is the highly popular road movie Y TU MAMA TAMBIÉN (2001) by Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, an otherwise funny and highly entertaining film that is constantly interrupted by a narrator who literally stops the film in order to add some often cheeky narration, a device the interferes with the rhythm and actually changes the pace of the film.  Similarly, Spike Jonze working on a continually evolving Charlie Kaufman screenplay in ADAPTATION (2002) is another headspinner, literally a screenplay about a screenwriter writing a screenplay adaptation of a book.  Some may find this device clever, while others will find it distracting and overly cute. 

In the two earlier works, the writing of the McDonagh brothers is risqué, marvelously inventive, and among the more hilarious films seen in the past few years, and this is a wacky and thoroughly enjoyable adventure as well, where superb acting is always a key to their work.  But this film continually gets sidetracked and bogged down, where the action literally stops as the characters themselves mull over what happens next.  Colin Farrell as Marty is the boozehound screenwriter living in the gorgeous LA digs with the beautiful dame, Abbie Cornish as a trophy girlfriend, while best friend Billy (Sam Rockwell) is continually hovering around him conspiring to change Marty’s life, especially the alcoholism, where the first change seems to be getting Marty kicked out of his girlfriend’s house for his outrageous behavior while drunk, which, of course, he can’t remember.  As he reviews what he’s got so far, writing a new movie script, all he has is a title, as he hasn’t figured out who the psychopaths are or what they do yet.  Billy throws ideas at him left and right, telling him stories or offering newspaper clippings, and slowly, the ideas come, which are visualized onscreen as psychopath #1 and #2, etc. expressed in vignette fashion until the list is complete.  Meanwhile Billy has a side con game going with Hans (Christopher Walken), where they steal pet dogs in a busy upscale block where there’s so much activity it’s easy not to notice the pets are even missing, and then return them as Good Samaritans for a cash reward.  This operation produces steady income until they steal the wrong guy’s dog, Charlie (Woody Harrelson), a local gangster who goes on a rampage trying to find him.  Meanwhile several other so-called psychopaths are on the loose, all allegedly creating mayhem, but they seem to get mixed up in a constantly evolving world of ideas/fantasy/stories where they continually get lost, only to be pulled out of a hat later.  

Undoubtedly, there is some brilliant dialogue written here, and some hilarious lines that almost get lost in the weirdness of what’s happening, where truth and fiction merge as a writer’s ideas are expressed in fantasy scenes, where underneath it all a script is being developed, and there are flashback sequences of various stories being told, all mixed together in a strange brew that doesn’t really hold together the abundance of ideas being offered.  There is a theatricality to the way ideas continually accumulate, but there is little tension or build up of suspense, so when events eventually happen, they feel more like random and isolated events rather than something connected to a whole.  The strength of the film is in its characters, where Rockwell in particular, along with Walken, are as good as they’ve been in years, where they have a brilliantly developed scene in a bar late in the film where Marty is telling Hans (with Billy trying to stop him) the story of the Buddhist/Amish/Quaker psychopath which resonates deeply with Hans, where Tom Waits has an equally compelling backstory, along with a Viet Cong monk who thinks the war is not really over.  Part of the problem is the director’s curious strategy to open the film a certain way, meeting the audience’s expectations, giving them plenty of action scenes, building up the suspense, but then going into a KILL BILL Pt. 2 (2004) style meditation on everything that’s come before, slowing everything down into an utter calm where each character seems to wander off in their own directions.  Never feeling much like a cohesive whole afterwards, instead it’s an obsessive passion on creating individual vignettes strewn together, like an opening scene, Tom Waits’ flashback, a bravura graveyard sequence, the expendable (mis)treatment of women, a hooker that learns to speak Vietnamese at Yale, a tape recorded monologue, a final shoot out (with a gun that jams) set in the desert of a national park next to a sign reading “no shooting allowed,” where by the end it’s questionable whether the project actually works or not.  Was it hilarious?  Individual moments, Hell yes, but does it make us care or come together and work collectively like some kind of existentialist take on writing or living in the modern world, probably not.

The Guard

THE GUARD                          B+                  

Ireland  (96 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  John Michael McDonagh

Why don’t you fuck off to America with your Barack O’Fucking Bama?
—Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleeson)

Written and directed by the brother of Martin McDonagh (one of the film’s producers), who wrote and directed the hitman black comedy IN BRUGES (2008), which made fun of the boring Belgium city of Bruges as a ghost town where absolutely nothing happens, both starring Brendan Gleeson, though here he single handedly carries the film in a wickedly comic performance that is nothing less than brilliant, even rivaling the British film THE TRIP (2011) as the funniest movie of the year.  While THE TRIP is wildly improvisational, relying on rival comics providing a steady stream of comic impressions, each trying to outdo the other, this film has hilariously perceptive writing, featuring an Irish cop, Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Gleeson), in a Gaelic-speaking region of Ireland poking fun at a black American FBI agent (Don Cheadle) flown in, supposedly an expert on international drug trafficking, continually pestering him with racial humor that also undercuts the so-called competency of American law enforcement, making this among the funniest and most socially relevant uses of humor seen in any recent movie.  “I'm Irish, sir, racism is a part of me culture.”  It’s funny, for a change, to see how the rest of the world amusingly views America as a cowboy culture that continually shoots itself in the foot, where our blunders are world renown, yet we continually perceive ourselves as experts.  American films rarely poke fun at our own ineptitude, as this would be seen as unpatriotic and anti-American.  But in an Irish film, showing a traditional, old-fashioned cop that except for his proclivity for profanity might be a brethren to Peter Falk’s Columbo, continually expressing himself with subversive humor in that thick Irish brogue, Gleeson gives one of the best performances of the year.

Foregoing the cheaper video route, this was shot on real film by Larry Smith, who worked on three Kubrick films, Barry Lyndon (chief electrician), The Shining (gaffer), and Eyes Wide Shut (lighting cameraman).  Somebody obviously paid attention, giving a luscious texture to the constant and steady stream of overcast gray that seems to perpetually hover over Ireland, shot mostly in Galway, suggesting a smaller rural location that culturally takes its pot shots at the ineptitude expected from the urban Irish capital of Dublin.  One of the more off the wall sequences even pokes fun of the IRA, finding little gems of humor across both sides of the ocean.  While the dialogue may need subtitling, as much of the humor is missed on an American audience simply due to the foreign accent, the tone of the film is a mixture of sharp, in-your-face humor, a showcase for strangely original side characters, and some refreshingly poignant, quiet intimacy between several of the characters, all of whom are connected in some way to Boyle, whose actions confound the drug smugglers, as he doesn’t act in the predictable manner they have come to expect.  That’s putting it mildly, as the guy doesn’t get riled, shows little fear, will stand up to anyone, face to face, and is the kind of down-to-earth guy you’d want to share a drink with, as that’s really when he’s in his element.  When he visits his terminally ill mother (Fionnula Flanagan) in a senior home, where everyone around her is just as old and sick as she is (how depressing!), their moments together are priceless, sharing a flask that he brings along, altering their memories to brighten up her day, where they even have a crack up moment giggling in church, where he wonders what she’s done at her age that needs to be confessed. 

But it’s the sudden arrival of bad guys in the vicinity that alters the landscape, that brings over the heralded “Yank,” and where dead bodies start turning up with regularity.  When we meet the trio of outlaws in a car, the ringleader Liam Cunningham is reading Schopenhauer in the back seat, while the nervous sociopath driver David Wilmot is competing with hitman Mark Strong for who can come up with the most obscure Nietzschean quote.  This is like something seen in a Hal Hartley movie, as is the very clever use of music, the Sergio Leone style score written by Calexico, a Mexican mariachi/Tejano band, while choice selections include the Bobbie Gentry ballad “Ode to Billie Joe,” which is heard playing in a diner while Gleeson and Cunningham have a face to face, like Pacino and De Niro in Michael Mann’s HEAT (1995), each conjuring up thoughts about what might have been thrown off the Tallahatchie bridge.  Reminiscent of the rich and detailed atmospheric mood established in Bill Forsyth’s LOCAL HERO (1983), the shoot ‘em up intrigue that develops from the inevitable attempt to stop the drug deal never outshines the attention to small details in this clever indie film, made for one-third the cost of IN BRUGES, where the authenticity of the characters really shines through, especially in the bar scenes, where musicians might be huddled off in the corner playing quietly, where the customers can actually hear one another, establish a dialogue and a familiar relationship, while developing that amicable jocular tone.  John Denver singing “Leaving On a Jet Plane” couldn’t be more poignant in its use here, as this film has a dynamite ending, not overpowering, as this remains a small film, but clever all the way through to the end, allowing some of the film’s smaller characters to shine.