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Calvary [Blu-ray]
Additional Blu-ray options | Edition | Discs | Price | New from | Used from |
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August 11, 2014 "Please retry" | — | 1 |
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| $21.44 | $21.33 |
Blu-ray
December 9, 2014 "Please retry" | — | 1 |
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Calvary | — | — |
Genre | Drama |
Format | Blu-ray, Widescreen |
Language | English |
Runtime | 1 hour and 41 minutes |
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Product Description
CALVARY's Father James (BRENDAN GLEESON) is a good priest who is faced with sinister and troubling circumstances brought about by a mysterious member of his parish. Although he continues to comfort his own fragile daughter (KELLY REILLY) and reach out to help members of his church with their various scurrilous moral - and often comic - problems, he feels sinister and troubling forces closing in, and begins to wonder if he will have the courage to face his own personal Calvary.
Product details
- Aspect Ratio : 2.35:1
- Is Discontinued By Manufacturer : No
- MPAA rating : R (Restricted)
- Product Dimensions : 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 0.01 ounces
- Item model number : 2298056
- Media Format : Blu-ray, Widescreen
- Run time : 1 hour and 41 minutes
- Release date : December 9, 2014
- Dubbed: : Spanish
- Subtitles: : English, Spanish
- Studio : 20th Century Fox
- ASIN : B00N9KD460
- Number of discs : 1
- Best Sellers Rank: #38,986 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
- #3,410 in Drama Blu-ray Discs
- Customer Reviews:
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Father James (Brendan Gleeson) is hearing confessions when the parishioner on the other side of the screen tells him about five years of childhood abuse at the hands of a bad priest. The man plans to exact revenge by murdering Father James, who is given a week to wind up his affairs. It is a small community and the priest recognizes his parishioner's voice, although that identity is not revealed to the audience. Father James takes no immediate action but spends the week tending to his small flock. They are an erring lot who are flawed, wounded, and deeply critical of Father James, who they verbally flay for the suffering, real and imagined, that they have experienced at the hands of the Catholic Church.
Father James' life is further complicated by his tenuous relationship with his daughter, Fiona. (Father James entered the priesthood after his wife died.) We also see him contrasted with his bishop and a fellow priest, both of whom are not bad men but who are not fully engaged in their vocations. This leaves the audience in the position of trying to suss out the mystery while observing a truly good priest struggle to live his vocation under seemingly impossible circumstances.
Writer and director John Michael McDonagh has given us a layered and nuanced film made for anyone who has ever struggled with faith, forgiveness, betrayal, and revenge. Above all, he looks at the cost to good priests who must struggle with the human fallout and suffering caused by bad ones. Brendan Gleeson, heading up an excellent cast, portrays the good priest with subtlety and depth which allow you to see into his soul as the week progresses.
Some reviews have criticized the villagers as quirky, broad caricatures. I felt that was intentional and that it would be a mistake to think they are intended as realistic personalities. The sharply drawn characters give Calvary the feeling of a morality play where each is a personification of a different sin or modern struggle with religion. Yet McDonagh doesn't allow it to rest there. In each case we are given glimpses, however brief, below the brittle facades to the human beings beneath. The director does not intend to allow us the detachment which has led to the problems his film highlights.
The most fully realized characters and relationship are Father James and Fiona who translate the struggles to live an authentic faith into real human terms for us. The insistence on the value of each person when combined with Father James' absolute integrity are the messages at the core of this movie.
You may see this billed as a dark comedy. I think that is inaccurate. It is a drama, straight up. Yes, there are some lighter moments but that is because life itself has some lighter moments even in the midst of trouble and darkness. It is no comedy.
Fundamentalists of both sorts, from atheist to Catholic, will either celebrate or mourn this movie as an attack on the Catholic Church. That approach is far too simple. Those who know real truth is never that easy will appreciate the way McDonagh shows both sides without setting up straw men to knock down.
The movie never felt like an attack on the Church to me. Instead of looking at the "evil clergy" McDonagh took the novel and welcome approach of presenting a good priest who doesn't defend horrific actions of bad men but also never denies his own vocation in the very Church to which they all belong. In fact, the inclusion of an angry Buddhist highlights the point that the problem of authentic faith is not constrained to any one religion but is a matter of each person's cooperation with God and others in their community.
If Calvary makes you uncomfortable, it is meant to do so. That's what the truth does. In this magnificent film we are shown Truth shimmering beneath the surface of a week in the life of this good priest. And given grace for viewers to take back into the world with them.
What impressed me most about this movie are the characters. They are, sadly, a true microcosm of so many parishes (and society in general) across the West. There was the strong priest (Brendan Gleeson) striving to fulfill his duties in the face of cynicism, anger and hostility towards the Catholic Church. There's the spineless priest who, although "nice", might not have the bravery and courage it takes to be a priest today. The bishop who looks the part but doesn't take a true leadership role. There are the parishioners and villagers who, as a whole, are contrarian to anything related to the Church and morality. And, as is usual in the course of Catholic history, that strong woman who keeps the faith. Who is not bitter but thankful.
There's a scene with a just widowed wife and Father James in which the widower and the priest talk about people's reaction to death and how they sometimes lose faith. The widower responds "It must not have been much of a faith to begin with if it was so easy to lose it." The Father responds that "Faith, for most people, is the fear of death. Nothing more than that." And that's the movie right there. That's what this is about. It accurately portrays what happens to so many people's faith in the face of hardship. Ostensibly, it's the priestly sex scandals they focus on but it can also be death (as in that scene), an 'unfulfilled' marriage, lack of direction in life, being unable to control your passions and so on. Some lose the faith as a result of this but some respond with virtue.
I appreciated the honesty in the movie. As a faithful Catholic I have a hard time finding a movie with the faith in it that's not corny/preachy and overly maudlin and also not just ripping the Church apart without providing a counterpoint that can be so easily injected. Although this movie left me talking to my screen and offering rebuttals and responses to the usual (Inquisition, money/land, all priests are bad, etc.) I didn't get the feeling it was doing this to bash the Church but to show how many segments of society view the Church. And that's the last thing I took from this movie. That after a crisis like Ireland went through (and Boston) many people's emotional reaction leads to a sadder conclusion if they can't reconcile and make something approaching sense: spiritual indifference. They just don't care.
Lastly, with all the lurid and melancholy themes in the movie I would normally have to turn it off. I started to watch this series called Wallander on BBC and that was the case for that show. The dry and caustic, Irish humor really provided a nice antidote to that. Fantastic movie!
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It starts in the confessional, where a male voice is heard telling Father James a story about his childhood. How he was repeatedly sexually abused and raped by priests, from the age of seven. He makes no confession, and does not seek absolution. Instead, he informs James that he is going to kill him, to pay back the church for the sins committed on him as a child. He even gives a time and place, Sunday week, on the local beach. We don’t see the face of this man, but we are aware that the priest knows who he is, as he recognises his voice.
That sets the scene nicely. We now know that Father James has eight days to live, and that he knows the name of his assassin. After consulting his bishop, the priest decides that he will not inform the police, despite the threat not meeting the laws of the confessional. As each day appears on the screen, we follow Father James about his everyday business, visiting his parishioners, and holding church services. The locals are a disparate bunch indeed. An adulterous housewife, a cynical local doctor, a disillusioned bar-owner, a gay policeman, and an annoying male prostitute. He also has to deal with an aggressive African mechanic, and a cantankerous old American writer, who wants to commit suicide. (A lovely cameo from M. Emmet Walsh, who was around 80 at the time, and looks it)
This is no longer the old Ireland, where priests could do no wrong, and expected deference from the community. There is much mention of the sex scandals that have rocked the church in recent years. Father James is often openly mocked, and many of the inhabitants claim to no longer have any religious beliefs. His daughter arrives for a visit, from her home in London. She has recently split from a long-term lover, and has tried to kill herself, by cutting her wrists. The two take time to bond once again, and examine the changes in their relationship over the years. As Father James struggles with his family and community responsibilities, the days leading to the fateful Sunday are counted down on screen.
This film is unusual and highly intelligent. It could have taken so many familiar paths, but chose none of them. It questions religion, deals with the collapse of the European economy in 2008, and the changes in society in Ireland that have followed that country’s social and financial elevation in recent years. When Father James asks the adulterous woman what she really wants to do with her life, she answers “Nothing. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin”. She quotes scripture back at the priest, to show him what she feels to be the pointlessness of life. Visiting a serial killer in prison, a local man who has killed and cannibalised young girls, he is told “If God made me, then he knew what I would become”. All around him, Father James’ life is unravelling, and Sunday is getting closer.
This really is a top-notch film. Brendan Gleeson, in one of his best roles by far, feels as if he was born to play Father James. English actress Kelly Reilly is just right as his troubled daughter too. As well as Walsh who I mentioned above, there is a string of impressive supporting actors. Dylan Moran as a lonely rich man, Aiden Gillen plays the cynical doctor, and Gleeson’s son, Domhnall, is the young serial killer, Freddy. One of the bigger roles goes to Chris O’Dowd, playing the town butcher, Jack. He may be known to you from parts in ‘Bridesmaids’, ‘Loving Vincent’, and the recent ‘Molly’s Game’. The scenery of Ireland plays its part too, with the rugged coast and rural setting adding to the overall atmosphere. Despite moments of laugh out loud comedy, and a witty and often sparkling script, this is not an easy film, with its dark undercurrents never far from the surface.
But I urge you to try to see it.
Powerful, heart-wrenching story of pain and forgiveness.
Sans rien dévoiler à l'histoire, ce film dégage une atmosphère à part, qui contribue à l'intrigue générale.
Les acteurs sont justes, Brendan Gleeson est bluffant en tant que prêtre irlandais (son rôle précédent était celui d'un policier dans le Connemara dans The Guard), Kelly Reilly (que Cédric Klapisch nous avait fait connaître avec son Auberge espagnole et ses suites) est très convaincante, Chris O'Dowd est quant à lui à l'opposé de son registre comique habituel (The IT Crowd, Moone Boy) et s'en sort à merveille.
Dommage que l'édition bluray n'existe pas, je l'aurais achetée sans hésiter.