BRENDAN GLEESON AND AIDAN GILLEN IN CALVARY

A pageant of sinners and a suffering priest

John Michael McDonagh, who previously collaborated with the great rock of an Irish actor Brendan Gleeson on The Guard (2011) where he there played a policeman, here directs him as a soutane-wearing priest in a little Irish town by the sea where he suffers a Calvary indeed. This McDonagh is solemn and lacks the outrageous wit of his younger brother, Martin (whose film debut In Bruges (2008), also starring Gleeson, was preceded by series of brilliant, shocking, and hilarious plays that put him forever on the theatrical map). Calvary the movie is a warped, grim, sometimes funny updated Irish version of a medieval morality play, a series of pageants in which Father James encounters a string of locals who stand for one example of human weakness and suffering after another.

That humor is always there in the caricatural edge of things, but you will get most out of this film if you take it very seriously, even reverently. It may seem at times to be hammering at you with a blunt instrument. ("Are all instruments blunt?" one character asks.) In its main outlines Calvary, whose title is no joke, knows no gentle way of telling its tale. It only works if one respects its simple, solemn passion in facing the state of society and the Catholic Church in Ireland as they are today. It's not a pretty picture. But it's not without hope either, when it's got priests like the one Brendan Gleeson plays here.

If you think it's all a joke, it must be gallows humor from first to last: the two McDonagh brothers are not so far apart, after all. Consider that the first scene is a death sentence. Father James sits for a confession that instead is a snarling threat from a parishioner (he knows who is is, but we don't, till the end) who was sexually abused by a priest for years as a little boy, and now promises to kills Father James himself, because killing a good priest will get more attention than killing a bad one, and the abuser, in any case, is now dead. (A frequent excuse of the Catholic hierarchy is that all those abuses are in the past. And Father James can do little more than simply say he's sorry.)

Then comes the series of tableaux. There is Father James's daughter (Kelly Reilly), visiting from Dublin with bandages on her wrists and looking for reunion and closure. Her father joined the priesthood right after his wife, her mother, died, leaving her ever since feeling doubly alone: pretty much everyone is alone in this film.

There is Jack Brennan (Chris O'Dowd), an angry, volatile butcher whose wife Veronica (Orla O'Rourke) cheated on him. The local cop, Inspector Stanton (Gary Lyndon) shows no understanding of human nature (do they ever?) maintains local morality by carrying on openly with a gangsterish male prostitute. A young man with big eyebrows and not much behind them has a desire to kill, and wants to join the army to fulfill it. (Joining the army in peacetime, Father James says, is insane, and Al Qaeda members are pretty thin on the ground in Ireland.) An aged American writer (cult actor M. Emmet Walsh) is finishing a book, and has a pistol to off himself when health fails. The richest man in the vicinity is Michael Fitzgerald (Dylan Moran), a depressed financier who lives in a great house like an aristocrat but has no manners, only a crude obsession with money. (Morality plays haven't room for subtlety.) Fitzgerald, who has long felt "detached" from everything, has now been abandoned by his wife, his kids, and even his Latina maid. Dr. Frank Harte (Aidan Gillen), who pops up frequently, is a drug-abusing, cynical, and godless working medical man who says brutal things whenever seen. On the sidelines like a mocking chorus is Isaach De Bankolé as a sneering black adulterer.

The Church has done many wrongs, and the well-meaning and decent Father James must take abuse for them whether he deserves it or not. So when he has an innocent conversation with a little girl walking to the sea, her fathers sweeps her into his car and spouts venomous suspicions of the Father's intended abuse. And the world seems too determinedly evil for him to help. A former student, Freddy (the excellent Domhnall Gleeson, Brendan Gleeson's son), is a serial killer in prison who asks Father James to come and talk to him but can find no repentance or forgiveness in his heart. Toward the end Father has a phone chat with his daughter, who has gone home, and says the Church has spoken too much of sins and not enough of virtues, and forgiveness is the best one of all. Maybe he's the only one who knows this.

Events assume an increasingly desperate and tragic cast as the passage of days takes Father James to the day the man in the confessional has told him he will die. Father James is pushed so far by events that he turns back to liquor and has a wild, drunken night. Sometimes the simple nightmarish intensity of things, roaring fires, priest-bashing, sneering sinners, a tippling altar boy painting landscapes by the sea, reads like Cormac McCarthy at his most apocalyptic. But the soulful conviction of Brendan Gleeson anchors it all, and this McDonagh's intense vision of the world's and Ireland's state of soul deserves our attention. A film that takes our spiritual well-being or the lack of it this seriously is a welcome rarity and this ramps up the portrait of a flawed good man doing his best in tense times that was The Guard's cop, with Gleeson again taking on the sins of the world, and the Church. One may watch this only for Gleeson, but one would not want to miss it.

Calvary, 100 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2014 and was shown at Berlin, Dublin, Glasgow and many other festivals. Its US limited release began 1 August.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.