Calvary [2014]

July 29, 2014

Fucking Ireland. Now say that sentence in an Irish accent. Fucking Ireland. It’s always so gloomy and dark. And depressing. It always rains, people are just sad but proud and just, and the scenery looks like home to Highlander or William Wallace (Scottish). Calvary is the second movie this week that wins you within the first few minutes. A fucking bombshell of a start. And Brendan Gleeson is just dominating the movie, the script, hell just about anything. And the rest of the crew is just amazing with so many familiar and loved actors.

I was wondering is this In Bruges 2, but it’s a whole new movie, just as good as the city one. Again with the black humor that livens up the atmosphere so much that it’s hard not to love the characters and their mishaps. Now I should tell you that this is a bit of a religious movie. In case you didn’t notice the church and the priest in the first scene. As Christians would say: I’m an Atheist. Naturally, as an atheist, I have enjoyed this movie and loved everything about it. I think both sides should see it and maybe forget the whole thing and let the science rule (such a neutral attitude, I know).

Father James Lavelle lives a simple life and tries to run his parish as best as he can. He has that old school wisdom of common folk and is able to deal with even the worst scum. As you probably know the catholic church is having a bit of a problem with pedophilia. It’s a small, insignificant problem, I mean they already apologized and all so I don’t know why I’m bringing it up really.

But as we all know among any group of people, especially if that group is at least marketing some relatively peaceful ideas (on the surface), is going to be a certain amount of good people. And the key word here is people, as we really are. With our nature and all. Whether they are really priests is the question. Father James Lavelle is one of them. But when he’s blamed and threatened, he will have to decide. Yes, decide.

It’s not easy to dance the thin line between religious movie and an atheistic one, to stay in the middle ground, as close to reality as possible. Calvary does it very well. It shows the real-life and the story of ordinary people. There are no explosions, superheroes, just us. And it touched upon so many issues, so many important issues, especially for “mature” people. That’s hopefully us. Humor is very important and black humor especially spices up the atmosphere and the mood of the movie. I just love these jabs that are just meant to fail and fail so miserably that they are phenomenally good. What’s there left to do then make fun of the shit and injustice around you. Check out Calvary and think about it…