...Lush Irish countryside along the beach. A “good” priest has been given the warning through the confessional that he has one week to live before the unseen perpetrator will put him down because he is a “good” priest. This unseen man believes this will bring into balance the wrong done to him as a child when he was raped by a priest who was not punished for it.
Flannery O’Connor at the end of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” says through the antagonist, “‘She would have been a good woman if there’d been somebody there to shoot her every day of her life.’” While this is specifically said of the protagonist, a grandmother quite ignorant of her influence and impact on the people around her, I believe O’Connor is making an obvious statement about human nature. The truth extends to Father James as he lives out a week balancing his duties and convictions as a priest with his responsibilities as a father and his faith as a man, a learned, astute, wise, discerning man. He was a good man before the proverbial gun was put to his head. Everyone in town suddenly becomes suspect—and while he intimates to the Bishop that he might know who it is—the rest of us are left wondering, listening to the voices carefully to see if we hear the tone and timber of that original confession in the opening scene. All the men in that town are troubled. All the men of earth are troubled. Yet the perspective is shifted ever so slightly through the filter of this eminent threat.
The film is billed as a dark comedy. The traces of humor in the script and play on words and language and relationships that led someone to deem it that are indeed dark but as a film, I disagree that it’s a dark comedy. There is dark humor there, satiric jabs; and poisonous sarcasm grows as Father James approaches the Sunday deadline. And just as that word carries a double entendre, language and images throughout the film carry the weight of double entendre, searing and sneering jokes and reparte failing to mask toxic wounds of the soul.
It is a social commentary, a cautionary tale, a character study (of many characters). It is insightful, revelational, simple and complex. You will see yourself in every character. You will long to have Father James as your confessor. You will long to stand between him and Calvary. But that would be to violate what God has set in motion—the grace, the deeply personal (violating) grace and calling for the one to let his faith emboldens him to walk directly into the blinding light of God’s unspeakable, inexplicable ultimate plan.
Do not read on until you have seen the film, then read as an invitation to discussion.
Calvary is of course the place where Jesus was crucified. The meaning of the word is literally, “place of the skull.” Connotations ring out as referencing the dark irony that we would put to death the very One who would be our way of salvation, one who would be most honest, most loving and forgiving. It is through the death of the One that we are saved. Does that make Father James a messiah figure? In as much as anyone who answers the call of Christ to follow and model choices after the teachings of Christ, yes. Jesus walked into his eminent death with similar phases of hope and prayer. As a story archetype, I believe James is a messiah figure. Any Christian seeing this film may be the most disturbed by this emotional climactic scene of the story (or not). Where James separates from Jesus in innocence is in admitting that whereas he cried at the slaying of his beloved dog Bruno, he confessed he did not cry when, personally detached, he read the news that came by way of the paper about so many children who suffered at the hands of pedophiles who masqueraded as priests. His honesty, his confession pulled the first trigger.
Parallels, cycles, connections are made at every turn in this film—the most profound perhaps being the one in the final scene.
Stories give us the opportunity to live vicariously, to search our hearts and minds and to connect with people and ways beyond our own, which also, conversely and miraculously are in reality our own. The power of life and language lies precisely in our need to connect in empathy—to love as to be loved—to understand as to be understood—to forgive as to be forgiven—to live as to die.
