Calvary

After observing a dignified Catholic priest vilified by one of his eccentric parishioners. a woman says:  "You have to put up with this shite all of the time?"  Shrugging, the priest replies:  "There's a lot of this going on."  Indeed.  In John Michael McDonagh's ludicrous Calvary, a long-suffering priest, played by Brendan Gleeson, is told that he has only a week to live -- another of his parishioners declares that he will kill the saintly pastor in seven days in recompense for childhood sexual abuse inflicted upon the man by another member of the clergy.  With logic typical to this script and production, the murderous avenger says:  "There's no point in killing a bad priest.  So I'm going to kill a good one."  Although it might seem implausible, the threat of homicide is the least of the poor priest's problems.  In the course of the seven days methodically chronicled in the picture, the priest's faithful dog has his throat slit and his tiny church is burned down.  (The best thing in the film is the scenery -- the action takes place in the ravishing west of Ireland somewhere near Sligo; the movie is gratuitously beautiful.)  Members of the priest's congregation attempt to seduce him and snort cocaine in his presence.  A decadent hedge fund millionaire, played by Dylan Moran who looks sad and besotted as usual, offers the priest 100,000 pounds and, then, threatens to kill himself.  Suicide is contagious in this film -- just about everyone is contemplating self-murder and many scenes involve the priest's  encounters with his daughter still bearing the marks of her attempted suicide.  It seems that the priest was married but, when his wife died, he abandoned his daughter for his vocation -- something that his daughter deeply resents.  The altar boy is stealing wine, a local butcher is pimping his wife to an auto mechanic from Guyana, and an elderly American novelist who resides near a picturesque lagoon like something out of Bill Forsythe's Local Hero asks the pastor procure him a gun so he can also kill himself.  The local chief of police is sleeping with an extravagantly flamboyant gay hustler who speaks with an affected Brooklyn accent exclusively in thirties' movie idioms.  The gay hustler and the cop, the novelist (played by M. Emmett Walsh no less!) and another kid who wears a bowtie and rides a motorcycle are whimsical characters right out of a Wes Anderson movie and the film, at times, plays like a sardonic cross between Moonrise Kingdom and Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light.  (And I've forgotten to mention the nymphomaniac and the serial child killer, the fashion-model beautiful French widow and the fatal car crash).  Gleeson is okay as the priest -- although he's stuck with oldest cliché in the world:  the two-fisted man of God is a recovering alcoholic -- of course, he gets drunk and, in the obligatory booze scene, doesn't just embarrass himself but shoots the town pub to pieces with a 45.  There are some impressive monologues in the movie but the film (and the village in the film)is so full of eccentricity, psychopathology, and threatened suicide that it makes David Lynch's Twin Peaks look placid and ordinary.  In this movie, everything is absurdly over-the-top.  At one point, the priest has to procure a revolver.  But it's just not any revolver, but an antique firearm that played a part in what the characters call "the first Bloody Sunday."  But why can't a gun just be a gun?