Everyone has a breaking point, and James Lavelle, the Irish Catholic priest at the center of John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary, reaches his one afternoon as he’s strolling down a secluded path toward the seaside in his little village of Rush, County Sligo. Encountering a young girl on his walk, the warm-hearted priest (Brendan Gleeson) strikes up a conversation with her, and her saucy attitude seems to lighten the heavy emotional burden he’s been carrying for days. But then their path is cut off by a car screeching to a halt. The girl’s father leaps out of the driver’s seat, demanding to know what the priest was saying to her. “I wasn’t sayin’ anythin’ to her!” Lavelle protests helplessly, but the father doesn’t believe him. He orders his daughter into the car and roars off, his eyes burning into the priest with the certainty that he’s caught a pedophile red-handed.
Greed turns out to be the most provocative of them in the context of the story, principally because the church itself is so afflicted by it. “It’ll be a black day the Catholic church is no longer interested in money,” cracks Michael Fitzgerald (Dylan Moran), a filthy rich landowner who shapes up as Lavelle’s most formidable antagonist. Fitzgerald’s wife has left him, taking their children, and the debauched millionaire consoles himself by pricing everyone and everything; when Lavelle pays him a visit in his palatial home, Fitzgerald removes a framed canvas by Hans Holbein from the wall, lays it down on the carpet, unzips his fly, and urinates on it. After Lavelle’s church mysteriously burns to the ground, Fitzgerald shows up at the rectory offering a donation of 20,000 Euros to rebuild it, to the fawning gratitude of Lavelle’s colleague, Father Leary (David Wilmot). Disgusted with both of them, Lavelle calls the millionaire on his boast that money is no object, contemptuously bidding him up to 100,000 Euros.
Directed by John Michael McDonagh
