PRIEST
A film review by James Meek
Copyright 1995 James Meek
Distributed by Miramax
Rated R
Director: Antonia Bird
Screenwriter: Jimmy McGovern
Cinematographer: Fred Tammes
Editor: Susan Spivey
Starring: Linus Roache, Tom Wilkinson, Cathy Tyson, Robert Pugh,
Robert Carlyle, Christine Tremarco
PRIEST is the second movie I've seen recently ending with "You'll Never Walk Alone" swelling onto the soundtrack. In HEAVENLY CREATURES, the Mario Lanza version plays over the credits as a wonderfully ironic grace note to a stellar film--the selection fits perfectly. In PRIEST, which is merely a very good movie, a rather tepid version of the song plays out as a banal reflection of the action. The song's appearance in PRIEST isn't inappropriate, but neither is it inspired, as it is in HEAVENLY CREATURES.
That sort of difference sums up my attitude towards PRIEST. It's a very good movie, but not an inspired movie. The director, Antonia Bird, and screenwriter Jimmy McGovern give us a film about Father Greg (Linus Roache), a rigidly traditional young priest assigned to a parish in Liverpool. He joins Father Matthew (Tom Wilkinson), a liberal priest more interested in the spirit of religious law than the letters. The two immediately clash, with Father Greg objecting to a sermon by Father Matthew in which the latter points a heavy finger at societal institutions. When he finds out that Father Matthew and the parish housekeeper, Maria Kerrigan (Cathy Tyson), have been involved in a long-term sexual and romantic relationship, he writes off Father Matthew as completely hopeless.
Father Greg, however, has some secrets of his own: he's gay, and he cannot keep from breaking his vow of chastity. He dresses in leather and bicycles down to a pub to meet a sexual partner. To his credit, Father Greg realizes his hypocrisy, but he cannot admit it to Father Matthew or anyone else. He cannot bring himself to break the seal of the confession, however, even when a fourteen-year-old parishioner confesses that her father "makes me do things." Father Greg has her tell her father that "I say it has to stop." He is wholly unprepared for the father's response, however: an eloquent, cold-blooded justification for acting upon his incestuous desires.
Father Greg spends the film discovering that while he's quite willing to be a Martyr, to wage Holy War on Sin and Evil, he lives in a world where he must instead make sacrifices, and do what he can to struggle against sin and evil. He tells his lover that in seminary school, he *knew* the answers to hypothetical problems--if someone confessed before a service that he'd poisoned the altar wine, Father Greg would martyr himself for his vow, drinking the wine anyway. He is utterly flummoxed, however, when confronted with his own desires, which seem ludicrous when articulated in terms of absolute good and evil; and when confronted with a reasoned, unrepentant evil that is utterly human, though utterly life-destroying.
PRIEST is crammed full of more plot lines and character development than nine or ten average summer blockbusters. It does Catholicism the (usually unwelcomed) favor of taking its tenets quite seriously. Critics who object to the film seem to feel that their faith is being mocked, that priests shouldn't be portrayed as sinning human beings. While Bird and McGovern make no secret of their liberal bias, however, no viewpoint in the film is presented unchallenged, and no absolute distinctions are made between good and bad Catholics. The filmmakers do not mock those parishioners who cannot forgive Greg his sins and feel that his presence before them is mockery at best and blasphemy at worst. The filmmakers don't agree with their position, but they do take it seriously.
The seriousness with which everything is taken is, in fact, its main fault. There are very few really lighthearted moments in the film. Although it is obvious that Father Greg lives to be a priest, we never see the joys or satisfactions that the position must offer, at least in theory. The profession is not condemned, but neither is it celebrated, and so Bird and McGovern present to the audience characters whose dilemmas are never fully believable because you're never sure why they're dilemmas in the first place. Father Greg utterly rejects the idea of leaving the priesthood to free himself to love whom he pleases, and it's obvious that being a priest means as much (or more) to him as being gay, but there's never any sense or explanation of what motivated him to become a priest in the first place.
This puts the whole movie in the rather awkward position of being an obvious hypothetical situation arguing the folly--or even the sin--of mistaking hypothetical situations for real life. Bird and the other filmmakers seem to respect Catholicism as the question it, but don't show any evidence of feeling the paradoxes and dilemmas of faith in the core of their being. PRIEST is a very good film, a very worthy film; ultimately, however, it never makes the final, alchemical leap, transforming good acting, a good script, and strong direction into a really powerful, moving motion picture.
Rating: 7 out of 10 on a scale where 1 = MOM AND DAD SAVE THE WORLD and 10 = REAR WINDOW
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