Thank God for Brendan Gleeson. Long before the invention of CinemaScope, movies found space for big men—not the beanpoles or the beefcakes but the frame-fillers, ursine and glowering. Gleeson is not the last of the breed (Brian Dennehy is still at work), but, with James Gandolfini and Charles Durning passed away, he is the most unignorable; any scene, whatever its mood, feels solidly earthed by his presence. Seldom does he use his bulk as Broderick Crawford, say, once did, to bully those in the vicinity. Instead, there is a diffidence, or a need to retire into the burrow of his own thoughts, that goes beyond grumpiness and deepens Gleeson’s appeal. You cannot imagine him being taken aback by the sins of the world, even when they move him to pity or scorn. How fitting, then, that his new film, “Calvary,” should see him cast as a priest.
Gleeson plays Father James, who tends the souls of a rural parish in County Sligo, on the northwest shoulder of Ireland. As aerial shots make clear, the countryside is fierce and green, with the Atlantic breaking the teeth of the coast, and a huge stone mass, like a giant’s vaulting horse, overhanging the land. That is Ben Bulben, enshrined by Yeats in verse, and it dwarfs all those dwelling below, save Father James, who strides around in his black soutane, with a beard of russet and gray. Piece by piece, the present reveals the past: Father James used to be a drinker, and he could be yet again, given the provocation and the chance. He was married, too, before being widowed and then ordained; he has a daughter, Fiona (Kelly Reilly), who comes to visit from London, with bandages on her wrists. You start to realize what burdens our hero has to bear. How does he summon the strength to lighten the woes of others?
All this is foreshadowed in the first—and best—scene of the movie. We see nothing more than the expression on Father James’s face, but it’s like an open wound. He sits in a confessional and hears the complaint of an unidentified man, who explains that he was abused by Catholic clergy from an early age, that the damage is irreparable, and that he has therefore decided on vengeance, of a very particular kind. By way of a public statement, he will murder a priest: not a bad priest—that would be too easy, and would solve nothing—but a good one. To be specific, he will murder Father James, in a week’s time, on Sunday, at the beach. “I’m going to kill you because you’ve done nothing wrong,” he says.
What a great setup. It plunges us, without ado, into the guts of a moral crisis, but it also has a satisfying smack of the whodunit or, rather, a who-will-do-it. Think of Agatha Christie’s “A Murder Is Announced” being handed to Dostoyevsky for a rewrite. Moreover, the sequence tells us quite a bit about Father James, who seems far more distressed by the recitation of the man’s sufferings than by news of his own impending doom—the true Christian response, which is even rarer in cinema than it is in ordinary life. If the film had ended there, leaving us poised on that existential brink, I would have been content. As it is, the writer and director, John Michael McDonagh, must see the rest of the story through.
It is divided into seven days, and parcelled out among a group of locals, who may or may not be involved with the crime to come. We get a writer, a butcher, a wealthy wastrel, an African car mechanic, a God-mocking doctor, a flirt who wears dark glasses to hide her bruises, and a detective with an irritating boyfriend, who insists on speaking in a bad Bronx accent. “He’s a character, eh?” the detective remarks of his beau, and that’s the trouble. All these folk feel like “characters,” worked up and tricked out with defining traits, as opposed to plausible people. More often than not, the priest’s encounters with them are played for awkward laughs—a real lurch of tone, after the opening scene, the intensity of which soon ebbs away.
Maybe that is deliberate; maybe McDonagh intended a composite portrait of a place from which the sea of faith has, within a generation (and, some would say, with good cause), begun its long retreat. The owner of the village pub, talking to Father James, refers to “your kind,” as if religion were the mark of an alien race. What stays with you from “Calvary” is not its dramatic pull but its solitude; look at Father James entering his bare bedroom, with its crucifix on the wall, and ruffling the white-golden fur of Bruno, his retriever and best friend. “Even the wisest man grows tense / With some sort of violence,” Yeats wrote, in “Under Ben Bulben,” and that includes the man of God. At one point, Father James gets hold of a pistol, as if planning a shootout, only to hurl it unused into the waves. The tension of “Calvary” is fitful at best, and much of the movie trips into silliness, but in Brendan Gleeson—in his proud bearing and his lamenting gaze—we see the plight of the lonely believer in a world beyond belief.
Another man commands the scene in “A Master Builder.” He is more daunting than Father James, yet less obviously suited to the task. For one thing, he is half the size. His name is Halvard Solness (Wallace Shawn), and he is an architect, with a special interest in making sure that nobody else builds anything at all. What pricks and spurs him on, it seems, is a vampirism of the spirit, and those from whom the lifeblood has been sucked include his wife, Aline (Julie Hagerty), his crumbling old friend Brovik (André Gregory), and Brovik’s son, Ragnar (Jeff Biehl), who has designs on being an architect himself. Good luck with that. More important, Ragnar is betrothed to Kaya (Emily Cass McDonnell); but she, too, is in thrall to Solness, who employs her as a bookkeeper, and reduces her to tremors with the merest touch.
For lovers of “Manhattan,” memories will stir of Jeremiah, the sexual conquistador played by Shawn, who appeared for less than ninety seconds and rendered the “little homunculus” immortal. In the case of Solness, however, such powers are no joke, and the crux of the drama relies on our believing in them—something of a problem, given the crinkled smile that plays at the corner of Shawn’s mouth and hints at deep reserves of rueful irony, as of a man betrayed. Likewise, the anxious twang in his voice chimes oddly with the personage of Solness, who should be at least half übermensch. Consider the worshipful eyes—blue, wide, and unblinking—of Hilde Wangel (Lisa Joyce), who met the Master Builder ten years ago, when she was only twelve. He forced himself upon her that day, and now she bursts into his home, clad in white shorts and chunky boots, craving not revenge but further enslavement, plus the “kingdom” that he promised her back then. Strange people.
If you are wondering what that kingdom entails, and whether Hilde makes any sense at all, or how Freudian your reaction should be to the towers that Solness is said to have constructed and even climbed, you are not alone. The film is based on Ibsen’s “The Master Builder,” which, since its première, in 1893, has left audiences flailing in confusion and alarm, and producers riven: should they strain for naturalism or surrender to a rich symbolic dream? This version was adapted by Shawn, and refined onstage over fourteen years by Gregory—their third collaboration, after “My Dinner with André” (1981) and “Vanya on 42nd Street” (1994). The director is Jonathan Demme, who continues in the darting, fidgety style that he brought to “Rachel Getting Married” (2008). Such relentless probing should suit the inquisitions to which Ibsen subjects his creatures, and yet, for some regrettable reason, the movie doesn’t really work.
One clue lies with James Joyce, a fervid Ibsenite, who noted, in an essay written at the age of eighteen, that the later plays, like this one, had “a tendency to get out of closed rooms”—quite a relief, after the cagelike chambers of “A Doll’s House” and “Ghosts.” But Demme and Shawn refuse this opportunity for fresh air; indeed, they hunker down, initially confining Solness to a sickbed, with nurses in attendance, and planting a strong suggestion that the whole episode with Hilde may have bloomed in his rotting mind. The camera, close enough to sniff the actors’ breath, conspires in this hothouse effect; after Solness declares his dread that “the younger generation will just show up one day and knock on the door,” there is such a knock, Hilde appears, and we suddenly zoom in tight on his dumbstruck face. “A Master Builder” is a bold endeavor, thriftily made, and there is muscle and volume in the performances; but had Demme hung back, and kept things cooler and quieter, the mastery of what Ibsen built, and the agon of his extraordinary hero, would have cast a more looming shadow. ♦
