★★★★★
Five Stars

Having seen and loved director John McDonagh’s previous film The Guard, about a morally questionable member of the Irish Garda, I came to Calvary expecting something in the same vein, but with a priest. To be fair, from what I could gather from the trailer and critics, it had all the same component parts: Brendan Gleeson, set in Ireland and a plethora of reviews sporting the phrase ‘dark comedy’ as their pull quotes. Let the good times roll, I thought, as St Augustine’s famous quote, ‘Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned’ appeared on the screen. However, despite having all the same component parts, Calvary is an entirely different, yet nonetheless compelling, beast.

Whilst it’s not untrue that Calvary has darkly humorous elements, if it is to be called a dark comedy it must be recognised that this humour is of a pitch-black variety, the comical moments wrapped in a barbed wire mesh of uncomfortable questions about faith, integrity and the state of the Church in Ireland after the sexual abuse scandals.

Brendan Gleeson plays Father James, a “good priest”, who is visited at confession by an unseen man who tells him he was serially and violently abused as a child by a member of the clergy, and that in revenge, he will kill Father James the following Sunday, so that he has time to ‘get his house in order’. Cue a ‘who will do it’ thriller? Not as such. Rather, Father James goes about his priestly business, and we meet the members of this bleak corner of County Sligo, all of whom taunt, insult or disparage him in one way or another, and each equally capable of being the potential killer. And yet they all turn up to Church, their disingenuous faith pointing towards the incongruous role of the Church in a community that would appear to despise it, but nonetheless goes through the motions of respecting it.    

The richness of these characters owes a lot to its stellar cast; Calvary features pretty much all the Irish big names, many of whom are better known for their work in comedies, such as Dylan Moran and Chris O’Dowd. However, their existence in the film as deeply troubled characters yet again wrong-foots an audience expecting Bernard Black or Roy from the IT Crowd.

Dylan Moran, who plays spiritually-void banker Michael Fitzgerald, features in a particularly memorable scene involving Holbein’s The Ambassadors, famous for its anamorphic skull. Indeed, death permeates throughout this film, both quite literally in the plot line of ‘will Father James die and who will do it?’ and on a more metaphorical level concerning the characters’ relationships with the Church and the banks, two of the disgraced pillars of modern-day Ireland. Gleeson himself does a spectacular job of embodying the calm, affable and thick-skinned priest whilst at the same time incorporating a roguish violent streak. A very complex character, Father James provokes more questions than he answers.

However, none of this is to say that the film’s darkness is overwhelming. McDonagh’s script still bristles with his characteristic razor-sharp and at times acerbic dialogue, which if not working to lighten the heavy themes being dealt with, provides relief from the darker moments. A reviewer from the Catholic Herald said that ‘[s]ome might find all of this too edgy, but others will laugh uproariously (I did)’, but I feel the Catholic Herald may have missed the point somewhat. There is nothing black and white about Calvary, humour and morality included, and therefore the laugh out loud moments are few and far between. Yet what it offers is a complex presentation of a country still reeling from the ruin of two of its most influential institutions in an elegant and considered manner, allowing for some wry smiles along the way. 

Christianity vs. Paganism

The Cybele cult is the original Spring festival, brought to Rome in 204 BC straight to the site which is now Vatican hill. Cybele’s lover Attis is a striking Jesus parallel – born of a virgin and re-born anually. Today, almost all of the traditions we associate with Easter – from eggs to bunnies – are a mix of the Pagan traditions to welcome in the Spring, and the Christian resurrection story. In another Pagan twist, the date of Easter is different every year – determined by the phases of the moon. The Bible states that this is because Jesus’ death and resurrection happened at the same time as the Jewish Passover, which was on the first full moon following the equinox. 

Ä’ostre

The Modern English name ‘Easter’ comes from the Old English ‘Ä’ostre’ or ‘Ä’astre’, who was a Germanic Pagan Goddess. The name derives from proto-Germanic ‘austrōn’ meaning ‘dawn’, fitting with Easter and Spring imagery of new beginnings. There has also been speculaton that Ä’ostre was a pre-christian fertility Goddess because of the Easter motifs of eggs and new birth, and also that her symbol was a rabbit or hare – possibly giving us the Easter Bunny. However, there is some debate as to whether or not she was made up by The Venerable Bede, who wrote about in his 725 text The Reckoning of Time (De temporum ratione) that: ‘Eosturmonath (‘Easter month’)… was once called after a goddess of theirs named Ä’ostre’.

Semana Santa de Sevilla

The week before Easter is known in Christianity as ‘Holy Week’, and includes Friday of Passion, Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday. A good place to experience the full ritual involved in the celebration of Holy Weeks is Seville in the South of Spain, where the residents celebrate with the precession of pasos – floats of wooden sculptures of scenes of the events of the Passion, or images of the Virgin Mary, accompanied by brass bands. During Holy Week the city is crowded with both residents and visitors drawn by the spectacle. The origins of Semana Santa de Sevilla are believed to date back to the Late Middle Ages.

Witches and Bonfires

As in many countries, Easter traditions in Finland mix religious motifs with customs welcoming the arrival of Spring. In a strange Halloween crossover, Finnish children traditionally go begging in the streets with sooty faces and scarves around their heads, carrying broomsticks, coffee pots and bunches of willow twigs. This mixes the Russian Orthodox tradition of birch leaves representing the palms laid down when Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday with the willow being the first tree to bloom in the spring. In some parts of Western Finland, people burn bonfires on Easter Sunday – an old Nordic tradition stemming from the belief that flames ward off witches, who fly around on brooms between good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Påskekrim

In Norway, Easter (‘Påske’, derived from the Hebrew word for ‘Passover’) is a colourful festival celebrating the arrival of Spring after the long darkness of winter. Bizarrely, aside from the traditional celebrations, Easter in Norway is marked by the reading of crime and detective novels. Each year, ‘Påskekrim’ or ‘Easter Thrillers’ appear in bookshops and on the television or radio – a tradition believed to have started in 1923 with the publishing of advertisements for the new crime novel of Nordahl Grieg and Nils Lie.

French Omelette

If you are near Southern French town of Haux in Northern France on Easter Monday, take a spoon with you. Each year, a giant omelette is served in the town’s main square. It uses more than 4,500 eggs and feeds up to 1,000 people. The story goes that when Napoleon and his army were travelling through the South of France, they stopped in the small town and ate omelettes. Napoleon liked his so much that he ordered the townspeople to gather their eggs and make a giant omelette for his army the next day.

★★☆☆☆

Two Stars

Having read decidedly mixed reviews of Darren Aronofsky’s new big-budget film Noah, I really wasn’t sure what to expect, other than perhaps Russell Crowe proving he can still take on a macho gladiator-esque lead after his, shall we say, interesting appearance in Les Mis last year. In spite of its varied reception, the phrase ‘biblical epic’ certainly stands out as a popular label for this $125 million project which has been a whopping 14 years in development. On emerging from the theatre I think I understand why. There really isn’t another way to accurately describe this 2 ¼ hour-long film – it’s just that: epic, and, to be honest, not a lot else.

Though the visual effects used to create the rain, crashing seas and the swarms of animals filling the ark (which is somewhat disconcertingly shaped like a big shipping container – not the best design for buoyancy) are all well and good, and definitely worth paying the extra few pounds to see on the big screen, there isn’t anything new or original about these effects.

Moreover, they are definitely undermined early on by the recurring feature of the ‘Watchers’; huge many-limbed monsters made out of rock that drag themselves around the place for no clear reason. While these apparently have some basis in the mention of fallen angels in the Jewish Book of Enoch, I severely doubt there is anything to suggest that they resemble the bizarre, knobbly deep-voiced creatures that feature heavily in this film. They could have been borrowed from an episode of Doctor Who or a cheap video game seemingly only to provide a solution to the practical problem of how Noah and his family were to construct such an enormous vessel on their own.

I realise that to point out here that if we’re to expect logistical explanations for every aspect of the story, it isn’t long before the question of inbreeding arises and I’m not sure it’s one the film’s creators or anyone could comfortably answer. Nonetheless, the ‘Watchers’ certainly added an unexpected element of humour to this epic catastrophe movie, albeit an unintentional one.

Moving on from the computerised monsters to the real people in the film, Russell Crowe’s Noah is compellingly dark and tortured, but let down by a stilted and unnatural sounding script, in which a few too many short and monosyllabic phrases are evidently aimed primarily at instilling that aforementioned epic quality. Jennifer Connelly gives a stand-out performance as Naameh, Noah’s wife, struggling to protect her loved ones from the ruthless side of his character, while Emma Watson, Douglas Booth and Logan Lerman all give respectable but unremarkable performances in their roles as Noah’s children.

Ultimately, Noah tries to give a new spin to the classic biblical tale, examining the psychology of the eponymous title character and raising questions about the conflict between justice and duty. Ray Winstone is a memorable and convincing Tubal-Cain, Noah’s nemesis and the representative of a human race that has become enslaved to coarse selfish instinct. At the same time, his character voices the irrepressible questions and doubts one feels when watching Noah shut the doors of the Ark to the outside world. These questions give the film some substance and highlight the blurred distinctions between the good and bad inherent in everyone.

At its heart, it is a film about the relationships within a family and how far each is willing to make sacrifices not only for a higher cause but also for each other. It is a shame these relationships weren’t given more room to develop during the film’s rather slow start as they are more engaging than the ostentatious special effects that dominate – not quite as epic though, I’ll admit.