No, No, Noah, but thank you, Calvary.

Any one who has read this Blog for a while will know that I usually see films through 'theological spectacles’.    That is, they can engage my living faith and my understanding of that faith, and  impact on them, positively or negatively.

I am not an academic theologian, or even temperamentally an intellectual.    Sometimes I read theologians 'in dialogue with film'  and wonder what they are talking about.   That is not their fault, I am sure they think clearly, it’s just that they don’t think the way I do.  Or rather, I don’t think the way they do.  Some of them, however,  have really valuable insights that do make sense to me.  One of them  is Robert K. Johnston, an American who taught at the Fuller Theological Seminary. 

In one of his books Johnston talks about different axis we can use as we respond to films.  

One of these compares the Experiential, or Sacramental with the Reflective/Analytical.   

The Sacramental includes the Holy and the Human, while the Reflective includes the experience of staying ‘in the movie’ and learning from it as a Theological Partner.   So a film can lift us beyond itself, and be revelatory, a sacrament, and/or it can be a thing in itself, to be appreciated as it is, and become part of a dialogue.   

Wondering how to put flesh on these bones brings me to the last two films I have seen.  Noah and Calvary.    Both are obviously concerned with faith matters, the story of the flood in Genesis on the one hand, and the spiritual journey of a parish priest on the other.

As I was watching Noah I found it really difficult to ‘enter into the film’.   I was continuously distracted by its use and misuse of the Biblical story, the bizarre additions to it and the changes made  in it.   I was often annoyed and sometimes amused.   I kept asking myself ‘why?’.   Why has Aronofsky, the writer/director, added fallen angels clothed in lava?  Why is the family structure of Noah changed so radically.  Instead of three sons, each with a wife, we have three boys and one adopted – and seemingly barren  - girl.   How anyone knows she is barren when she is a virgin is a just another distracting  question.  Tubla-Cain, Noah’s half brother according to Genesis, is now a king , using his forging skills to wage war on Noah for possession of the Ark, and then stowing away on it. 

It seemed clear that Aronofsky had not found the original story dramatic enough, so he added to it and changed it.   I wondered why is he being so free with scripture on the one hand, while also trying (presumably) not to offend faith communities – this story being important in Judaism, Christianity and Islam -  by never naming God, other than talking about the Creator.   Noah does not ‘hear from God’, he has herbally induced visions.   And he totally misunderstands the nature of God – and his task.  If there is one 'good' thing about the movie it is that eventually Noah learns that love and forgiveness are more important than judgement and punishment.    But even after that I was disappointed that Aronofsky, like most other people, completely ignored the point of the Rainbow Covenant; that God will not kill us, but that if we take a human life our own life will be taken, not as punishment, but in compensation.    Genesis  chapter 9 verse 6 is a difficult text, but it is there. 

So this is a film that never allowed me to ‘enter into it’.  It kept me at arms length.  It never offered me the chance to learn with it, as a ‘theological partner’.   Nor did it offer a sacramental experience by helping me enter into the divine any better, either in its transcendent or its Incarnational dimension.  I learnt nothing new about God or humankind. 

By seeing what this film did not offer I understood what Johnston was saying some films can offer.

And then I saw Michael McDonagh’s new film, Calvary.   You can read my critique of it below, so I will not go into it in detail.  But I notice that having seen Noah I had nothing to say about afterwards, whereas as I could not stop thinking about Calvary.

On the one hand I was totally engaged by Calvary from the first to the last.    It has a kind of who-dun-it structure, or rather a who-will-do-it?  The central character, Father James is told at the start that someone intends to kill him in a week’s time.   So we wonder who the intentional killer is.  But that is not the point of the film.   This is not a thriller.  Father James says he knows who it is, but he does not  tell the police.  Something else is going on here.    As the film introduces us to some of the members of the parish we see that  most of them are troubled, angry and often in pain.    The priest’s own daughter is depressed, recovering from a botched suicide attempt, and angry with her father for not ‘being there for her’ when her mother died and she needed him most.    It seems that his own grief in still unresolved in many ways.    Maybe it is relevant that I too am an ordained widower,  that I know how parishioners can project all kinds of virtues and vices onto their priest, that they sometimes seem to think priests are immune from hurt, or that they we can deal better  with loss, bereavement and grief.   That we are somehow more than human and less than human.  But this film did not simply reinforce my self-understanding;  it stretched it.  

Calvary also spoke to me of the sacramental nature of faith and priesthood.   In this context I must say that I have always believed in the priesthood of all believers, and in the particularity of how our individual priesthoods are expressed and offered.     Watching Calvary  was revelatory, it taught me new things.   It was sacramental, it was about the Holy, and at the same time it opened itself up to me, both as a ‘thing in itself’ and also in reflective dialogue.  I have been talking with it ever since I saw it.

Calvary has helped me understand Robert Johnston’s point by seeing in this film each of the dimensions of this particular critical matrix.   By doing so it will, I think, help me think more clearly about the films I have seen, and will see.    

There are many more critical tools and valuable insights in Johnston’s book; Reel Spirituality, theology and film in dialogue, Baker Academic, 2000.   If you, like me, take pleasure in reflecting on the films you see I commend his book to you.   And maybe  I should also be grateful to Aronofsky for his dreadful film. As someone once said, everything has a value, even if it is only to be a bad example. 

Despised, rejected, and acquainted with grief, the road to Calvary.

This film starts with a quote from Augustine.

Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved. 

Do not presume, one of the thieves was damned’.  

We might think that this is therefore about redemption, but it is much more complex than that.   John Micheal McDonagh, who wrote and directed it, must surely know that this was one of Samuel Beckett’s favourite quotes.     McDonagh himself says it is part of his suicide trilogy.   I think it is one of the most arresting films I have seen for some time.    I saw it 24 hours ago and have not stopped thinking about it since.

I last saw Brendan Gleeson in McDonagh’s film The Garde.   In his new film Gleeson plays another West Coast Irishman, another loner, another maverick,  and again the smartest man in the room, but how different the priest in Calvary is to the Garde.   He looks different, and it is not the priest’s beard that does it, it’s all in the eyes.   

This priest, Father James Lavelle, is the classic scapegoat.  He will pay the price for the sins of the community, those of the Church and of his parishioners.  He is described at the start of the film as an innocent man, carefully chosen as a victim because he is innocent.   But he is not naïve.  One of his parishioners says he is just a bit to smart for this parish.   And he is not innocent like a lamb.   In some ways he is more like a goat.   He is a powerful and assertive man, willing to confront his ‘sheep’ if he thinks they are straying, and to correct them if they show insufficient respect for Christianity or the Church.  And he is no saint.   He is not without sin, not without falling short.   When push comes to shove he is willing to shove back, hard.

The Sligo landscape in which this film is set is dominated by a huge square, squat hill (I think it’s Mount Knockarea), its former towering heights now crumbled, and its flat top surrounded by a ruin of fallen rock.    Is this a deliberate visual reference to the state of the Church in Ireland?   It still dominates the landscape, but its former glory has decayed, its moral power is diminished.  Its current priests live in its shadow, and too many of its victims still live in darkness. 

At the start of the film I assumed that this was to be the story of Father James’ Calvary, but by the end we see that most of the film’s characters are carrying their own heavy crosses.   They are hurt and angry.  Calvary is concerned with anger, its roots and effects,  particularly people’s anger at the Church that allowed so much abuse to happen and then go unacknowledged, unpunished and often unapologized for.   Calvary is concerned with the way the past sins of the abusing priests have distorted their victims lives and still impact on those around them.    And these sins are not only those committed in Ireland.   The historical cruelty of Christian missionaries in Africa is also referenced.     This is a film about anger, but it is not an angry film.  Its last, wordless, scene is surely about forgiveness.   It ends literally on a grace note.

We saw some of the cast in The Garde, including Pat Shortt, Gary Lyndon and the diminutive Michael Og Lane.    In Calvary we also see how Chris O’Dowd can play straight.   Domhnall Gleeson (Brendan’s son)  plays a cameo, and I did not recognize him - even though I enjoyed his work in True Grit,  Anne Karenina and About Time.  This was   not because he was heavily made up, he was not.  He simply played his character so convincingly I didn’t look past the ‘persona’.

Kelly Reilly, who I last saw as Mrs. Watson in the two Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes Movies, plays Father James’s daughter (his wife, her mother, died before he was ordained).    Hers is a quiet, understated, yet crucial performance.  

Dylan Moran plays a less convincingly written character, representing the financiers who’s criminally irresponsible behavior brought about the ruin of the Southern Irish economy, and yet walked away unpunished.    Unpunished, but not content.  At one point he pisses on a painting.  It is  Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, with its famous anamorphic skull.   He is trying to impress the priest with his indifference to his own wealth.   The priest is unimpressed,  but the painting itself is a reminder, amidst the pomp and power of the political world, of our common mortality. 

Some other characters are emblematic, and McDonagh acknowledges this himself within the film.   One of them, Dr Frank Harte, tells us he is ‘the atheistic Doctor, it’s a clichéd role.’

Calvary is a serious film, unflinching yet essentially humane.   It pulls no punches in order to make its point, and maybe it tries to land too many of them.   But it is held together by the strength of Brendan Gleeson’s central performance, one of the most convincing portrayals of a priest I have seen on screen.    I also admire Mr. Gleeson’s commitment to Irish cinema.     He has played in many big budget movies, including Braveheart, Michael Collins, Lake Placid, Mission Impossible  II, AI, Gangs of New York, Troy, and The Kingdom of Heaven, Harry Potter.    He could so easily become Hollywood’s Irishman of choice, but he keeps a home on Galway Bay, and his presence and considerable gifts have made movies such as The General, The Butcher Boy, In Bruges The Garde and Calvary successes.

Xan Brooks recently wrote in The Guardian, that Gleeson “plays God’s servant as a recovering alcoholic with an impossible task, variously fuelled by rage, reason and sadness.  Here, at least, is a Christ we can relate to” and  “How refreshing it is, in the wake of Darren Aronofsky’s lumbering, self important Noah, to see a spiritual saga that is smart enough to take route the less traveled, the low road to glory.  Calvary touches greatness.  It crawls clear through the slime and comes out looking holy.”

I could not say it better myself, so I wont try.