Friday, July 17, 2015

Calvary (Movie Review by Bob Racine)



                                 1 hr & 40 min, color, 2015
                            
An Irish Catholic priest Father James (Brendan Gleason) is catapulted into a crisis of faith, when he receives a death threat from one of his parishioners, delivered in person in the confessional.  The supposed killer is a hater of all things Catholic for past sexual abuse committed against him by the Church, and he has randomly chosen his own parish priest to answer for it. He gives Father James a little over a week before a set day and time in a set place “to get his affairs in order” before he dies.  Father James knows who the man is by voice, but his priestly vows require him to hold in confidence what has been said to him and the identity of the man. 
                            
Or do they???
                            
 Only a fellow cleric and the local police chief are informed about his situation but without disclosing any identity. 
                            
Sounds gripping does it not?  To be sure what we have here is a plot situation that is quite unique.  But something is not right about the way it is treated, and after two viewings I think I have figured out what keeps it from working, at least to my satisfaction.  More about that in a moment! 
                            
Undoubtedly Father James is an individual of considerable interest.  He pastors a very small church in a coastal village of Ireland.  He looks to be somewhere in the vicinity of 55 or 60, heavy set, thick of beard, not particularly demonstrative of emotion – until the death threat undermines his composure and drives him to erratic, irritable and slightly riotous behavior.  He becomes a bit abrupt with some of his parishioners and somewhat dismissive of others.  He even purchases a gun.  The only creatures to whom he displays any overt affection are his dog and his grown daughter.  
                            
He is a widower, married for many years; it was after his wife’s painful and lingering death that he entered the priesthood, a choice for which his daughter is having a difficult time forgiving him.  She feels that she lost both parents at once, her mother to the grave, her father to the service of God.  It is her untimely visit from Dublin that makes the death threat crisis even more unsettling for him.   
                            
Gleason is a good actor, and gives us some throbbing moments of confrontation with the man’s flock.  But despite this, I do not feel as if I ever got but so close to his heart, except for a tender interaction with his daughter in which they both confess to an abiding love for each other, before she heads back to her home.  This is the most gratifying moment in the whole film for me.  But what really drives this man?  What propelled him to take up the cloth at such a late time in his life? 
                            
There are other questions that nag at me.  In what kind of inner spiritual life is he engaged?  An individual clergyman, of whatever denomination, certainly has goals and objectives he wants to reach by means of his labors.  What is his vision?  Why do we never hear him preach?  What is he trying to accomplish in his community?  Or is his routine practice some kind of penance?  If so, penance for what?  What profession did he follow when he was a layman?  Not once in the footage does he recall experiences from his past.  Filling us in on some of this material would have given much more body and depth to the film.  The man would have come much more alive.    
                            
What does the script do instead?  It gluts us with an assortment of dreary, unanchored, desperate, depressed and depressing characters who do most of the scene chewing.  Just who is this movie about anyhow?  Among his parishioners we do not meet up with one single devout individual, one person who has something really important and insightful or supportive to offer him.  At best they give only a grudging respect, if even that.  They are self-loathing or morbid or vulgar or totally disillusioned – just plain stuck and going nowhere!  Not one of them lit any fire inside me or aroused my interest or fascination. 
                            
And just a passing comment: I was disturbed that the only woman parishioner in the bunch we ever meet is an adulterous, boozy, masochistic wife who flaunts her infidelity before everyone, even her priest.  All of the others are men.  That would not have been so defeating, if all the men had not been such moral and spiritual deadbeats.  It seems that just about everyone has something to flaunt that is distasteful to Father James.  At moments I felt as if I was viewing imitation Bergman, especially the celebrated Swede’s work “Winter Light”, another dark chronicle about a priest in a struggle with his faith.
                            
“Calvary” is an independent production, with original writing and direction by John Michael McDonagh.  What I would like to have seen him do is keep the story focused tightly upon the priest and his professed assailant.  McDonagh seems to prefer hiding the dangerous man away in the crowd until the climactic point.  He writes as if there would be some sense of inevitability heaped upon these two men.  But despite the tale of horror the professed assailant spews out, one that certainly reflects the scandalous contemporary crisis with which Catholicism is faced, the character is given no real airing.  He seems to come off as nothing more than a mortal threat, a man of venomous self-pity and an irrevocable death wish, who adds further to Father James’ agony by burning down his church building.  As with the priest, we are not allowed but so far into his heart and soul.  He is there and gone in a matter of minutes.  We are deprived of further character study. 
                            
McDonagh gets his feet stuck in the mud and has really covered very little ground, after all is said and done.
                            
The only dramatic value the movie evidences is that of suspense.  That may be enough for some viewers.  What is Father James going to do?  Will the threat get carried out?  We are kept on edge.  But the outcome that might have been a catharsis turns out to be only a grisly shock and little more. 
                            
The movie is the sort of thing that devout Christian thinkers are surely drawn to, despite the mess it is.  I saw evidence of that when a group of my church friends and acquaintances and I got together recently and discussed it.  I would not begrudge anyone the right to examine the film in fine detail for purposes of discussion.  Others are apparently more satisfied with it than I am, and I have no problem with that.  If I were as inclined to think theologically as I once was about a half century ago, I might have considered it a morality play or a tale of guilt and alienation, with the priest a Christ figure.  But I now approach any movie drama as an art form, not as an illustrated sermon, and as a work of art I find “Calvary” rather anemic.  
                            
This movie will most likely be viewed by very few individuals.  It certainly is not a general audience vehicle.  But it may have enough of a special audience appeal to give it a return on its cost, even though McDonagh is no Bergman.


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Friday, July 10, 2015

A Beautiful Mind (Movie Review by Bob Racine)



                                 2 hrs & 14 min, color, 2001
                                     
Finding one’s way back!  The way forward, many of us have found, is the way back and vice versa!  I know that I personally, and many friends with whom I am on somewhat intimate terms, have come back from what might have been crippling crises and been forced to navigate into our futures with a different set of bearings than the ones with which we once started out.  But no one in recent times has undergone this testing process more protractedly and painfully than John Nash, the famous Nobel Prize winning thinker and mathematical scientist who just a matter of weeks ago died in an auto wreck at the age of 86 with his wife Alicia. 
                                     
His struggle with paranoid schizophrenia, that began when he was thirty years of age and on the verge of a notable professorial career at MIT, was of epic proportions.  The movie about Nash’s life and struggle, however, is not an epic; it is a small-scale but marvelously composed and brilliantly acted out drama that celebrates the love that had to fight its way through many monstrous barriers to redeem him and make the comeback he has experienced possible.   
                                     
What Nash is noted for within the scientific community is his contribution to Game Theory and Economics.  It was, in fact, for Economics that the Nobel award was given to him.  He was a Princeton graduate, and it was at Princeton that he finally spent the life he had remaining after his recovery.  He did not ask to be taken back onto the faculty, only for the privilege of auditing courses and for the use of its library to do his own continuing research.  It took considerable time for the faculty to be convinced that he was indeed recovered enough to be trusted and before he began to gather about him a student following.  Late in life he was finally reinstated.
                                     
Paranoid schizophrenia is a subject of considerable interest to me, with two members of my extended family so afflicted.  It is difficult for the average person to fathom just how overpowering it can be.  The person literally hears voices and literally sees people and things that do not exist.  Those voices and those mirages can be so compelling that they impair one’s ability to grasp reality.  They can hold a mind and a body captive.  I shudder to imagine just how much of a nightmare its occurrence must have been before modern medicine and psychiatry came into being.  Those who suffered from it were placed under lock and key, written off as “demented” or “possessed by devils.”  It is one of the more rash illnesses that Jesus was supposed to have cured – by nothing more than ordering an “unclean spirit” to “come out of the man.”  But both of these individuals distantly related to me have demonstrated that even for them the real world makes sense when they achieve, however temporarily, a normal grasp of their circumstances. 
                                     
There are some so afflicted who have composed great poetry or painted classic portraitures or written brilliant music.  We have read in recent times about the lack of training the police are given in how to understand and handle such an individual, when s/he is out of control and is a danger to self and surroundings.  Some of these encounters have resulted in needless deaths, when the sick individual out of control is treated like a criminal.  There is a compassionate way to handle them, even if it of necessity involves a form of very tough love.  But it amounts to love just the same, not brutal subjugation.
                                     
Director Ron Howard and his Screenplay Writers Akiva Goldsman and the book’s author Sylvia Nasar had a challenge on their hands deciding how to portray in movie terms the dynamics of the disease, but they had the good sense and the imagination to ensnare the audience in Nash’s darkest periods of delusion.  We viewers for a while are inclined to believe that we hear the voices, that we see what he sees.  We share the fear that he really is being sought out by the FBI, that he really is being roped into Cold War intrigue and held accountable to his overlords for the protection of classified information, that his ability to decipher codes is something his country depends upon for its survival.  The cloak and dagger stuff has the grim feel of familiarity from our past acquaintance with spy novels and motion pictures.  After all, it would not be so unbelievable that our government would force someone of Nash’s genius into working for it. 
                                     
As biopics go, this is evidently more accurate than the average one, at least according to the book’s author Ms. Nasar.  There are details of his life that she developed that the movie omits, but she was generally pleased with the adaptation.  She called it “substantially accurate.”  Russell Crowe’s portrayal of the man is a powerful unearthing of anguish, raw nerve and self-torment giving way over very believable developments to blessed self-discovery.  His work should be a subject of intense examination by any student of acting.   Christopher Plummer also does his usual fine turn in the small role of the psychiatrist who treats Nash, helping him find out the difference between delusion and reality.
                                     
And Jennifer Connelly is quite magnetic in the role of the wife Alicia, who stuck by her husband and father of her child, even through an extended separation, maintaining the role of caretaker.  A most exceptional human being!  She exerts remarkable emotional control and vibrancy while in the grip of consuming emotions.  She and Crowe are a choice pair.  Their scenes together are an intense mix of romantic playfulness and candid confrontation.  They find humor where one would least expect it.  I do not remember two movie characters that I have ever cared so much about; walking with them was an elevating experience, despite Nash’s confessed disinterest in people generally – a solitary person whom Alicia coaxes out of his solidarity.
                                     
There are things that anyone who appreciates this film has to take on faith; I might even say a leap of faith.  How does the endless scrawl of mathematical equations come to serve and influence global trade negotiations, national labor relations and even Evolutionary Biology?  That is a puzzle I daresay my abstract mind could not get itself around. 

And just as demanding of our leaping faith is the claim that Nash has made about how he overcame his demons.  He insists that it was not medications that delivered him but the exercise of a disciplined mind or what he calls a “diet of the mind. I choose not to indulge certain appetites” that are harmful.  There has been much skepticism about this claim, and the screenplay tactfully avoids the controversy by stressing the healing process itself.  Some have voiced disappointment over this, but I have no trouble with it.
                                         
I must confess that it was Nash’s death last month from the accident (an ugly end to the beautiful mind) that revived my interest in the movie.  I had seen it at the time of its release fourteen years ago but had forgotten about it during the long interim.  I suspect that I am one of many in this regard, being as how I had to wait weeks before Netflix could send me a copy; they posted Very Long Wait next to the title on my queue.  But it was worth the wait, because I experienced it this time at a depth that I do not remember having reached the first time.  I can say most ardently that “A Beautiful Mind” is a beautiful motion picture.  It deserves to be rediscovered.

                                     
To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.