I'm not really a fan of "The Guard". It was certainly entertaining and reasonably funny but it was also deeply derivative; it often felt like something John Michael McDonagh's more talented brother Martin might have thrown out as not quite up to the mark. "Calvary", McDonagh's new film, is a considerable improvement, if again not wholly successful. For a start, it doesn't feel remotely 'realistic' but then, I hear you ask, why should it be. Realism is not necessarily a prerequisite for a successful drama but this film feels 'scripted', full of stock characters teetering, and sometimes falling over, into cliché. What McDonagh has given us here isn't so much a realistic drama but a parable, a passion play set over the course of a week in which a kind of Christ figure, (in this case, a 'good' priest), waits for his own Calvary which he knows is coming. It begins in the confessional when someone we don't see tells the priest, (Brendan Gleeson), that he will kill him a week on Sunday. The would-be murderer's reason for this is two-fold; as a child he was repeatedly raped by a priest now dead and secondly, why kill a bad priest? Isn't it a much greater affront to an uncaring God to kill a good priest, a man who is totally innocent? McDonagh is reputed to have said that this is his 'Bresson' film and yes, there is something Bressonian about the hell that Gleeson is living in, for here is a rural Irish community that could have come out of Dante and have been drawn by Bruegel. There are drug addicts, a rent boy, adulterers, disbelievers, even a child murderer, all well played but none particularly feasible, (it's hard to accept that a policeman who openly avails himself of the services of a gay rent boy would slap a priest in the pub or that a priest would start firing a gun around a bar and then get beaten up by the barman). If you can't believe in the characters then it is hard to accept the initial premiss. Still, if this film is something of a failure it's an honest and an ambitious failure. The last ten minutes or so are quite devastating and Gleeson, as always, is superb. (Stand-outs in the supporting cast include Chris O'Dowd's cynical wife-beating butcher and Dylan Moran's drunken land-owner). As to who the potential killer is, McDonagh keeps us guessing to the end, throwing in the customary red-herrings to side- track us on the way. It's a film I believe has been overpraised and yet there isn't much else like it out there at the moment. See it and judge for yourselves.
