Two very different movies, linked by the theme of individuals struggling with hostile social contexts.

First, Calvary, a movie directed by John Michael McDonagh, released in 2014, and charged with an amazing amount of power...

With a title like Calvary and a death threat in the opening scene ("I'm going to kill you because you're innocent"), you're pretty sure this story isn't going to end happily. Not in any conventional sense, anyway.

Then, as you follow Father James Lavelle's attempts to meet the needs of the flock in his Catholic parish in County Sligo, you're struck by how much mockery and anger he has to absorb. He's a good man, it seems, intelligent, kind, and observant. But all he receives in return is abuse.

Why? Well, it's partly the rot caused by multiple child abuse cases, which have haunted the church, and never truly been resolved, so that everyone associated with its hierarchy starts to be tarred with the same brush. It's partly the negative influence that the church has often exerted, with "too much talk about sins and not enough about virtues", as the priest puts it. It's partly the aftermath of the "Celtic Tiger" era, when the church did not seem sufficiently interested in castigating corporate and financial sin. And it's partly just a good old postmodern rebellion against authority, that says, in effect: We no longer want religious (or indeed any other) institutions interfering in our lives; we no longer have any fear of them either; and in fact, we delight in ridiculing and taunting them.

Father James is caught in the perfect storm of all this, derided and reviled by people who, in their various experiences of pain, lash out at someone they think can't or won't fight back.

And he doesn't fight back. Well, once he does, after his church has been set on fire, and his dog killed. He gets drunk, and shoots up the bar of the pub, an act of aggression for which he pays dearly at the hands of the brutish landlord. But generally, Father James just takes it on the chin. He followed his vocation to be a priest after the death of his wife, even at the expense of abandoning his daughter (in her eyes, at least). He can't just opt out. He can't just run away.

We can't help but think: "He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth..." And in the "holy week" that is granted to the priest before the murderer intends to carry out his threat, there are glimmers of other parallels with the Christ figure. They're never neat correspondences. That would be too mechanistic. They're just hints, and things that make you wonder. Is his violence at the pub his Gethsemane moment, when he briefly looks for another way out? Is his offer to help the depressed financier akin to Christ's forgiveness of the dying thief? Is his quasi-expulsion of his fellow-priest, who is shallow and money-grabbing, a sort of cleansing of the temple? 

Ultimately, Father James follows his vocation all the way to a windswept beach and a murderer.


Ireland, 1992/3

You could say that he literally died for the sins of others. I would prefer to say that he died in solidarity with all their victims.

Richard Rohr: "The Divine Mind transforms all human suffering by identifying completely with the human predicament and standing in full solidarity with it from beginning to end. This is the real meaning of the crucifixion. The cross is not just a singular event. It’s a statement from God that reality has a cruciform pattern."

What's missing in the film, though, is any kind of resurrection... Yes, in the closing scene there is a hint that the daughter is extending forgiveness to the screwed-up perpetrator. But it's a slender and ambiguous little thing to hold against the weight of that horrible death.

Rohr again: "The pattern of transformation is always death transformed, not death avoided. The universal spiritual pattern is death and resurrection, or loss and renewal."

Without any equivalent for this renewal and transformation, we have to ask whether Father James's death was worth it.

Would it not have been better to dob the man in, since the priest was fairly sure he knew who it was? Why let the killer go on to commit the sin? Why let his daughter lose him again? Why put her in the position of having to decide whether to forgive his murderer? At one point in the movie, someone speaks of Christ's death as a kind of suicide. Was this, in effect, also suicide?

With only a tenuous thread of hope held out to us, we're left with a lot of darkness, a lot of questions.

Still, they're fascinating questions, and it's unusual to be able to chew through this kind of stuff after watching a movie. So... kudos.

And the landscape is sublime... If we ever -- ever -- get to travel again, this is an area of the world I would dearly love to take a look at.







Belle, a 2014 movie directed by Amma Astante, is very loosely based on the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804). If Father James labours under the difficulty of being a priest at a time when the priesthood is out of favour, Dido labours under the difficulty of being a biracial woman at a time when white society has little understanding or tolerance of anyone who looks different, and slavery is still running full tilt.

In real life, Dido is the daughter of a young black woman and a white naval officer (who -- although the film doesn't mention this -- went on to father four more children by four more different mothers, their baptisms recorded in Port Royal, near Kingston, Jamaica). Very unusually, Dido was raised at Kenwood House, Hampstead Heath, as part of an aristocratic family. At its head was William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, who -- in his capacity as Lord Chief Justice -- oversaw a number of court cases that focused on the legal status of the slave trade.

Dido's exact position within the household is not clear, but she was certainly not relegated to the role of servant, and was educated alongside her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray. A fascinating and very lovely contemporary painting shows the two of them together. While Elizabeth is lit and positioned in a way that seems to indicate she takes pride of place, Dido is given her own personality and is not at all portrayed as a servant or slave, as was typical in the iconography of the time.

Having looked after Lord Mansfield until his death, Dido married a steward named John Davinier.

This is all very interesting, and it's surely a worthy idea to lift such figures from the obscurity into which a male- and white-oriented recounting of history has thrust them.

Yet I found the movie a little unsatisfactory.

Call me finicky, but when the script gives Dido and Davinier (recast as a lawyer) leading roles in influencing a case that Mansfield has to judge, and then gives that case more emancipatory significance than it seems to have really had -- well, for me, it has invented too much...

I was also bothered by apparent anachronisms. Respectable ladies just did not exchange ardent kisses with their lovers out on the street...

Overall, I think this is a reasonable summary: "The movie is intelligently written and well-acted, but it doesn’t sit all that comfortably between the two stools of Austenesque Romance and Socially Conscious Drama."

Nevertheless, the bicultural Asante is certainly a director to watch out for.

The other little mystery about this movie was that it credits the Isle of Man for some of its shooting, but I didn't recognize anything...

It turns out that this was the first project to follow a multi-million-pound investment deal between the Manx Government and Pinewood Studios, and it was expected to contribute about a million pounds to the Manx economy.

Yes, yes, but where WAS it?

Well, apparently, they used Billown Mansion (which I'd never heard of) and Castletown (the dungeons of Castle Rushen apparently made great slums, and the quayside area became a dock yard).

According to the producer, the island provided everything they needed, and "even two days of abysmal weather worked quite well for the scenes we were shooting."

According to the location manager, they also used "an old mill in Peel" (I have no idea which one) for some interiors. He continues: "The rain was so heavy on the day we filmed there that the property flooded and we had to dash and buy sandbags... Although the rain didn't let up all day, we did manage to achieve everything we needed to."

Ah, yes... That's my island...


Possibly my favourite place on earth...