David Lamble Post date: 05/09/08- 00:00:00 AM Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Internet Movie Database
In this age of cheap irony how many filmmakers will risk ridicule by trying to get us to cry over something as out of fashion as a crisis of faith? Antonio Bird's 1994 heartfelt if seriocomic undressing of a guilt-riddled young priest and his shacking up with his housekeeper older mentor – as the men cope with all measure of carnal indulgence in a sooty Liverpool diocese – feels even more spot on since the American Catholic Church's meltdown over wayward priests.
When we first meet Father Greg – between his earnest sermons and his late night boy shagging the almost translucently wan and handsome Linus Roache makes the best screen case for a fatal dichotomy between flesh and soul since the debut of Peter O'Toole – he's a fresh out the seminary crusader who discovers to his horror that his parishioners hold the real power over the definition of sin. Anguished over a fourteen-year-old girl's tearful confession of molestation by her shockingly unrepentant dad, Father Greg must choose between the tenets of a cynical, scandal fearing Bishop and a liberation theology spouting fellow priest, an early incendiary turn by the then emerging star character magician Tom Wilkinson.
Jimmy McGovern's witty screenplay, while thankfully sparing us a guitar mass, incorporates absurdist working class humor, J.F. Powers worthy priestly portraits – a hilarious interlude has a Latin speaking rural homophobe act as a chaperone for what he imagines to be a lovers' tryst between Roache and Wilkinson -- a sensual if doomed romantic subplot between Roache and boyfriend Robert Carlyle, while ultimately invoking the most appealing version of an Irish Catholic world since the heyday of John Ford. Bird and McGovern make wicked and poignant use of the symbol of the communion wafer – as Father Greg denies his boyfriend Christ's body after availing his own – as well as the multiple meanings of martyred naked flesh.
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