Thursday, September 11, 2014

9/11 and the Fog of Denial

Posted By Robert Spencer On September 11, 2014 @ 12:58 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 12 Comments

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

Can music ever really capture the emotions of 9/11?

Thirteen years after 9/11, there is one thing that virtually all our politicians, law enforcement officials, and mainstream media guardians of opinion know: that attack had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, and neither does any other jihad terror attack, anywhere, no matter how often its perpetrators quote the Qur’an and invoke Muhammad. Islam, we’re told again and again, is a good, benign thing – indeed, a positive force for societies, and to be encouraged in the West. Jihad terror is an aberration, an outrage against the Religion of Peace’s peaceful teachings. These lessons from our betters are coming more and more often in light of the advent of the Islamic State.

The caliph Ibrahim, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has a PhD in Islamic Studies. But Barack Obama is unimpressed with his Islamic erudition: “ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents.” State Department spokesperson Marie Harf emphasized that Obama meant what he said: “ISIL does not operate in the name of any religion. The president has been very clear about that, and the more we can underscore that, the better.”

Secretary of State John Kerry said that for some members of the international coalition he hopes to build against the Islamic State, joining it “will mean demolishing the distortion of one of the world’s great peaceful religions.”

British Prime Minister David Cameron chimed in:

What we are witnessing is actually a battle between Islam on the one hand and extremists who want to abuse Islam on the other. These extremists, often funded by fanatics living far away from the battlefields, pervert the Islamic faith as a way of justifying their warped and barbaric ideology – and they do so not just in Iraq and Syria but right across the world, from Boko Haram and al-Shabaab to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Where is “Islam” actually battling these “extremists who want to abuse Islam”? Cameron didn’t say.

Showing as much grasp of the situation as Kerry, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond declared: “Isil’s so-called caliphate has no moral legitimacy; it is a regime of torture, arbitrary punishment and murder that goes against the most basic beliefs of Islam.” On the opposite side of the aisle, Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper complained that Islamic State “extremists are beheading people and parading their heads on spikes, subjugating women and girls, killing Muslims, Christians and anyone who gets in their way. This is no liberation movement — only a perverted, oppressive ideology that bears no relation to Islam.”

Unfortunately, for every Islamic State atrocity she enumerated, there is Qur’anic sanction:

Beheading people: “When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks…” (Qur’an 47:4).

Subjugating women and girls: “Men have authority over women because Allah has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because Allah has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them” (Qur’an 4:34).

Killing Muslims: “They wish that you reject Faith, as they have rejected (Faith), and thus that you all become equal (like one another). So take not Auliya’ (protectors or friends) from them, till they emigrate in the Way of Allah (to Muhammad SAW). But if they turn back (from Islam), take (hold) of them and kill them wherever you find them, and take neither Auliya’ (protectors or friends) nor helpers from them” (Qur’an 4:89).

Killing Christians: “Fight those who believe not in God nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by God and His Apostle, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29).

Even if the Islamic State is misinterpreting or misunderstanding these verses, it is doing so in a way that accords with their obvious literal meaning. That should, at very least, lead to a public discussion about the possibility of Islamic reform, what is being taught in mosques in the West, and related issues. But such a discussion is not forthcoming; it would be “Islamophobic.”

And why does it matter, anyway? Why does it make any difference whether or not what the Islamic State is doing is in accord with Islamic texts and teachings?

It matters for many reasons. Aside from all the vague condemnations of the Islamic State that American Muslim groups have issued, how closely the Islamic State actually hews to the letter of Islamic law will help determine how much support it will ultimately get from Muslims worldwide. Two American Muslims have already been killed fighting for it; how many more will there be? Only by examining the Islamic State’s actions in light of an honest assessment of Islamic teachings will we be able to estimate to what extent we can expect to see its actions replicated by other Muslims elsewhere.

These dismissals of the Islamic State’s Islam, of course, are designed to assure us that we need not have any concerns about massive rates of Muslim immigration and the Muslims already living among us. One problem with this is that it prevents authorities from calling upon Muslim communities to teach against the doctrines that the Islamic State acts upon, and to work for genuine reform. And so the door remains open to the possibility that the actions of the Islamic State could be repeated in Western countries.

Barack Obama, David Cameron and the rest would do far better to confront the Islamic State’s Islamic justifications for its actions and call on Muslims in the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere to teach against these understandings of Islam that they ostensibly reject. But they never do that, and apparently have no interest in doing it. Instead, they foster complacency among the people of the West. For doing so, they may never pay a price, but their people will almost certainly have to pay, and pay dearly.

On Wednesday, Australian police raided an Islamic bookstore and arrested two Muslims on terror charges relating to their activities in recruiting Muslims for the jihad in Syria. Australian Federal Police National Manager Counter Terrorism Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan insisted: “This has got nothing to do with Islam, this is criminal behaviour by Australians involved in terrorist activity.”

Gaughan could have uttered the epitaph of the West: “This has nothing to do with Islam.” As the jihadist’s knife slices through their necks, Western officials like him will use their dying breaths to gasp it out one more time: “This has nothing to do with Islam.”

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Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Bono Reveals Secrets of U2's Surprise Album 'Songs of Innocence'

In his only pre-release interview, Bono takes us inside the story of the band's 13th album, which was released today for free on iTunes

http://www.rollingstone.com/
September 9, 2014

U2 surprised the world today by releasing Songs of Innocence, their first album in five years, as a gift from Apple, available for free immediately to anyone with iTunes. The band made the announcement with Apple CEO Tim Cook at a Cupertino press conference for the new iPhone 6, capping the event with a performance of the album's first single, "The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)." After a standing ovation, Cook said, "Wasn't that the most incredible single you ever heard? We would love a whole album of that."

"The question is now, how do we get it to as many people as possible, because that's what our band is all about," Bono said. "I do believe you have over half a billion subscribers to iTunes, so — could you get this to them?" "If we gave it away for free," Cook replied. And five seconds later, the album was unleashed in the largest album release of all time.

"We wanted to make a very personal album," Bono told Rolling Stone's Gus Wenner the day before the press conference in an exclusive interview. "Let's try to figure out why we wanted to be in a band, the relationships around the band, our friendships, our lovers, our family. The whole album is first journeys — first journeys geographically, spiritually, sexually. And that's hard. But we went there."

The band worked on Innocence for two years with producer Danger Mouse (a.k.a. Brian Burton), then brought in additional help: Flood, their collaborator since 1987's The Joshua Tree, plus Adele producers Paul Epworth and Ryan Tedder. "I think having them around really helped," says Bono, "Some of the music out there now that people call pop, it's not pop – it's just truly great. And we wanted to have the discipline of the Beatles or the Stones in the Sixties, when you had real songs. There's nowhere to hide in them: clear thoughts, clear melodies."

To begin, the band went back to its roots: Bono says the group listened to the music they loved in the Seventies, from punk rock to Bowie, glam rock, early electronica and Joy Division. The album kicks off with "The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)," a loping pop song laced with distinctly punk-ish power chords. "I found my voice through Joey Ramone," says Bono, "because I wasn't the obvious punk-rock singer, or even rock singer. I sang like a girl — which I'm into now, but when I was 17 or 18, I wasn't sure. And I heard Joey Ramone, who sang like a girl, and that was my way in."

The driving, reggae-tinged "This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now," is a tribute to the Clash, with slinky guitars from the Edge that nod to Sandinista!. "After we saw the Clash, it was a sort of blueprint for U2," says Bono. "We knew we couldn't possibly hope to be as cool, and that's proven to be true, but we did think we could get behind a sort of social justice agenda."

There is also an intensely personal song about Bono's mother, Iris Hewson, who died when he was 14. "Forty years ago, my mother fell at her own father's funeral, and I never spoke with her again," he says. "Rage always follows grief, and I had a lot of it, and I still have, but I channeled it into music and I still do. I have very few memories of my mother, and I put a few of them in a song called 'Iris.'"

The most joyous track on Songs of Innocence is "California (There Is No End to Love)," which unexpectedly nods to the Beach Boys in its intro. "It's like the sun itself," says Bono. "It's about our first trip to Los Angeles." The darkest track, meanwhile, is "Raised by Wolves," which tells of a deadly car bombing in Dublin. "It was a real incident that happened in our country where three car bombs were set to go off at the same time in Dublin on a Friday night, 5:30," says Bono, "On any other Friday I would have been at this record shop, just down the corner, but I cycled to school that day."

At times Songs of Innocence feels almost like a concept album about Bono's early years – there's even a track named after the street where the singer grew up, "Cedarwood Road." "It has a lyrical cohesion that I think is unique amongst U2 albums," says Bono, "I don't want it to be a concept album, but the songs come from a place. Edge laughed and said this is our Quadrophenia. We could be so lucky."

Review: U2 - 'Songs of Innocence'

By Neil McCormick

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

9 September 2014

From left, Timothy D. Cook, the Apple C.E.O., with the Edge, Bono and Larry Mullen Jr. of U2 on Tuesday in Cupertino, Calif. CreditMarcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

U2 have announced the release of their 13th studio album, Songs Of Innocence, available now and free to all iTunes customers. And, after several years' gestation, five producers, ever-shifting release dates and Bono publicly fretting that the biggest band in the world was on the verge of irrelevance, fans will be relieved to hear that it sounds a lot like U2.

It is an album of big, colourful, attacking rock with fluid melodies, bright anthemic choruses and bold lyrical ideas. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that, despite apparently being created in a spirit of self-doubt, it sounds fresh and cohesive, bouncing out of the speakers with a youthful spring in its step.

On first impressions, Songs of Innocence is not an attempt to create a grand masterpiece that redefines the band, but rather, as the title suggests, to reconnect them with an elusive pop elixir of youthful energy and passion. Lyrically, it reflects on the past, on their origins as a band and as individuals, which is unusual territory for the usually forward-looking Bono and the Edge (who share lyrical duties). Lead single and opening track, The Miracle (of Joey Ramone) sets the confident tone, with its “oh-way-oh” choral chant, glam rock stomping rhythm and surges of grungy guitar.

Lyrically, it is a celebration of the transformative power of music, and in particular the effect on the young U2 of hearing The Ramones, and in that spirit it keeps things simple and direct. There are songs about growing up on the north side of Dublin (the fierce and strange Raised By Wolves and the dense, somewhat ungainly Cedarwood Road), memories of Bono’s late mother (the chiming disco driving Iris (Hold Me Close)) and appreciations of musical inspirations (the loose, groovy This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now is dedicated to Joe Strummer, and celebrates the Clash spirit of passion and purposefulness).

Each track seems very defined in itself, opening with a trio of songs aimed directly at American radio (The Miracle, Every Breaking Wave and California (There Is No End To Love)), packed with chiming guitars, synth hooks and epic choruses. It sounds like U2 taking on such young stadium rock pretenders as Snow Patrol and The Killers, intent on beating them at the game U2 themselves invented.

An immediate standout track is Volcano, a thrilling, thumping yet delightfully quirky celebration of the power of rock and roll that sounds a bit like Franz Ferdinand on steroids. The Ryan Tedder-produced ballad Song For Someone is probably the track that will have fans holding their phones aloft in stadiums, a mid-tempo ballad that builds from plucked acoustic intimacy to heart-bursting emotion. It is one of the songs that hints at ideas and feelings in the deeper currents of an album made up of dazzling surfaces.

It clearly hasn’t been an easy album to make. It is six years since No Line On The Horizon (itself widely deemed a flawed album) and three years since they completed their record breaking 360 Degree tour. There were long sessions with cool American producer Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, who started working with the band in 2010. The album was first mooted for release at the beginning of 2014 (hence the release of a one off single, Invisible, in February), but since then there have been sessions with Paul Epworth (British producer for Adele, Coldplay and Florence And The Machine) and Ryan Tedder (top songwriting collaborator with the likes of Adele, Taylor Swift and Beyonce), both highly commercial producers who bring some contemporary sheen. Long-time collaborator Mark Ellis, aka Flood, is also involved, although, in the end, it appears to have been U2’s engineer Declan Gaffney who has put in the long hours to tie it all together (leading to promotion to a full production credit).

With the album’s October release only confirmed at the very last moment (with the pressure of the Apple iPhone launch looming), I have the sense that it was plucked from the band’s grasp in the mastering suite, probably with the Edge protesting that he’s not finished yet and there’s one more echoing guitar note to be added.

For me, on first contact, it is the Danger Mouse tracks that hold the most interest, and perhaps hint at directions U2 might have rewardingly explored if they had stayed their original course and weren’t quite so intent on maintaining massive stadium-level success. Touching synth ballad Sleep Like A Baby Tonight and dreamy, sinister album closer The Troubles (with a perfectly pitched vocal chant from Swedish singer Lykke Li) are the kind of strange pop songs that can really get under your skin.

Lyrically, here and elsewhere, hints emerge that these reminiscences of the past are not quite as innocent as they first appear, and that this is an album laced with guilt, working towards self-forgiveness and redemption. “I’m a long way from where I was and where I need to be,” Bono croons on Song For Someone, suggesting that there is perhaps more experience at work in this album than there is innocence.

It is, at heart, a highly personal set of songs. There are no flag waving anthems, no big social causes. If there is a moral, it appears in the coda of Cedarwood Road: “a heart that is broken is a heart that is open.”

As a long time U2 fan and supporter (in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I am thanked in the album credits, albeit with my name misspelled), I wouldn’t put it on a par with their greatest work - Boy, Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby or even the seamless songs of All That You Can’t Leave Behind. At times it does sound like it is trying a bit too hard to please. But it's more pop than Pop ever was, and it certainly does the job it apparently sets out to do, delivering addictive pop rock with hooks, energy, substance and ideas that linger in the mind after you’ve heard them.

Review: U2 - 'Songs of Innocence'

By Ed Power
http://www.independent.ie/
9 September 2014

Like a thunderclap from the clear blue sky it appeared : U2's first album in five years. In what surely rates as one of the entertainment industry surprises of 2014 the band announced Songs Of Innocence was being made available immediately for free download to Apples iTunes subscribers, after they had performed their new single The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone) at an Apple press conference in California.

The tens of thousands who rushed straight to their computers to listen to the record will be glad they took the time. Soaring and strident, Songs Of Innocence sees the Dubliners going back, with palpable confidence, to what they are best at: uncomplicated rock anthems with vast, uplifting choruses and guitars that shoot for the moon. Indeed, at moments, it almost feels as if U2 are ticking off a check-list of signature tics and tropes. Earnest vocal overreach from Bono, glittering Edge solos, mid-tempo ballads that hum with spiritual yearning – devotees may be pleased to know U2 have dived into their wardrobe of cliches and emerged with arms full. Not since 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind have U2 sounded so fully comfortable with the idea of being U2.

Throughout Songs Of Innocence, the quartet's 30 year catalogue is rifled shamelessly. The cloud scraping 'woah-oah-oah' of The Miracle of (Joey Ramone), which kicks the LP off, has tinges of early 2000s hit Elevation; the processed grandiosity of California (There Is No End To Love) suggests a missing outtake from How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb.

U2 were rumoured to have pulled the album's release date in March, fearful the project lacked a knock-out hit (they were stung when Get On Your Boots, the lead single from No Line On The Horizon, flopped in 2009). They appear to have remedied that issue by hooking up with producer and songwriter Ryan Tedder on Song For Someone, a brash, buoyant radio clarion call that, as it achieves escape velocity, practically explodes from the subwoofer (even if, as will be the case for many, your first experience of listening to the album is on tinny computer speakers ).

But though U2 are self-evidently eager to continue their reign as world's biggest band – a title increasingly under threat from younger acts such as Coldplay, The Killers and Arcade Fire – Songs Of Innocence is about looking back as much as forward. Bono, especially, seems to be wrestling with growing older, and his changing relationship with the past. On Raised By Wolves and Cedarwood Road he ruminates on his upbringing on the Northside of Dublin ( there are further Irish references on soulful closer, The Troubles ,with backing warblings from Sweden's Lykke Li). The chiming Iris (Hold Me Close) will, for its part, be interpreted as a valentine to his mother (for whom, one assumes, it is named).

With its ghostly, glittering groove Iris is one of several tracks where the influence of producer Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton can be detected. Burton was originally due to oversee the entire record. However, following the release push back in spring, U2 returned to tried and trusted collaborators such as Mark Ellis (aka Flood) and engineer Declan Gaffney as well as Adele producer Paul Epworth and the aforementioned Tedder. Together they have concocted a grandiose, in places slightly ridiculous LP, richly provisioned with thumping riffs, histrionic vocals and Technicolor choruses. Recoiling from the monochrome bombast of No Line On The Horizon, U2's 13th album is their most unrestrained in quite a while – it may well be one of their finest too.

- See more at: http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/music/music-reviews/review-u2-songs-of-innocence-30574981.html#sthash.AUfG0I2i.dpuf

Review: U2 - 'Songs of Innocence'

With ‘Songs of Innocence,’ U2 Recasts Its Youth

By Jon Pareles

http://www.nytimes.com/

September 10, 2014

Memories are a blast on “Songs of Innocence,” the album that U2 released on Tuesday afternoon as a worldwide giveaway. With a title that echoes William Blake, the album is a blast of discoveries, hopes, losses, fears and newfound resolve in lyrics that are openly autobiographical. It’s also a blast of unapologetic arena rock and cathedral-scale production, equally gigantic and detailed, in the music that carries them.

The immediate news was that “Songs of Innocence” (Interscope) can be downloaded free until Oct. 13 by everyone with an iTunes Store account: half a billion people in 119 countries. (Physical and digital versions of the album go on sale Oct. 14.) The giveaway is a dream scenario for U2, a band that has always wanted everyone to feel its choruses and sing along. Apple has made distribution the easy part; the bigger challenge for U2 is to make people care about a new statement from a familiar band.

During its five years between albums, U2, which released its first recording in 1979, publicly pondered how to stay relevant. Its solution, on “Songs of Innocence,” is to reimagine its young, retrospectively innocent selves and recall what fired them up: family, neighbors, lovers, street action and of course, music. Liner notes by Bono, the band’s lead singer and main lyricist, fill in many of the back stories, describing the songs as “first journeys.”

There are tributes to Joey Ramone, whose example showed Bono how to sing melodically but feel punk, and to Joe Strummer of the Clash, whose social consciousness inspired U2. In other songs, traumas are as significant as joys. “Songs of Innocence” includes “Raised By Wolves,” about a terroristcar bombing in Dublin in 1974 and its aftermath; “Sleep Like a Baby Tonight,” a prettily sinister depiction of a pedophile priest; and a nostalgia-defying song about “Cedarwood Road,” the Dublin street where Bono grew up. In the song he calls it “a war zone in my teens.”

The music on “Songs of Innocence” doesn’t hark back to the open spaces of early U2; it exults in multitrack possibilities. But it connects emotionally to a time when, as Bono sings in “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone),” “I wanted to be the melody/Above the noise, above the hurt/I was young/Not dumb.”

As U2 worked on the album, producers came and went, including some now-vanished flirtations with dance-music hitmakers and the back-to-basics guru Rick Rubin. Of U2’s longtime production brain trust — Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, Steve Lillywhite, Flood — only Flood has a few credits on “Songs of Innocence.” Instead, the album credits Danger Mouse (Gnarls Barkley, Broken Bells) as overall producer, with frequent collaborations from Paul Epworth (Adele) and Ryan Tedder (OneRepublic). And U2 sticks decisively to rock.

Clearly determined to compete for radio play with the many younger rockers who studiously emulate U2, most of the album puts a higher gloss, and sometimes a heavier fuzz tone, on the band’s instantly recognizable sound. The music is still defined by Bono’s buttonholing vocals, the Edge’s echoing guitars, Adam Clayton’s brawny bass lines and the steadfast march beats of Larry Mullen Jr. on drums. But there’s a newly eruptive sense of dynamics in these tracks; when the band assembles a celestial vocal choir or a gorgeous swirl of guitars and keyboards, a pummel or a distorted roar is rarely far behind.

U2 also makes clear its sense of history. The first verse of the Joe Strummer tribute, “This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now,” looks back to the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” before switching to a Clash beat. An homage to the Beach Boys — a chorale of vocal harmonies and then a surf-tinged beat — runs through “California (There Is No End to Love),” a song about U2’s first visit to Los Angeles and broader thoughts. “There’s no end to grief,” Bono sings. “That’s how I know/And why I need to know there is no end to love.”

The songs ground philosophical musings and high-flown imagery in concrete reminiscences and events. “The star that gives us light has been gone a while/But it’s not an illusion,” Bono declares in “Iris (Hold Me Close),” which memorializes Bono’s mother, Iris Hewson, who died in 1974. It has the album’s most poignant chorus: “Hold me close,” he sings, “I’ve got your light inside of me.”

Conscious of mortality and tied to personal stories, most of U2’s new songs don’t sell themselves to teenagers like the generalized pop anthems of current U2 imitators (including Mr. Tedder’s OneRepublic) or, for that matter, the 1980s U2 that came up with songs like “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” Even the album’s two most direct songs about romance, with sturdy melodies and straightforward buildups — “Song for Someone,” about meeting a soul mate, and “Every Breaking Wave,” about a looming breakup — are tinged with misgivings and ambivalences. U2 can’t return to innocence, and knows it.

The album’s closing song, “The Troubles,” moves abruptly away from glimpses of volatile youthful aspirations to envision lingering adult disillusion. The arrangement moves U2 considerably closer to Danger Mouse’s songs with Broken Bells. Over minor chords backed by a string section, a guest vocal by the Swedish pop singer Lykke Li warns, “Somebody stepped inside your soul,” and Bono follows up: “You think it’s easier to put your finger on the trouble/When the trouble is you.” It’s a dark postscript, a reminder that growing up doesn’t resolve youth’s contradictions; it brings sorrows of its own.

Brendan Gleeson talks about his dark deep drama in “Calvary”

Cahir O'Doherty
http://www.irishcentral.com/
16 August 2014

In Calvary, the new film by director and writer John Patrick McDonagh, Ireland’s Brenan Gleeson gives a slow burn performance as James Lavelle, a good man navigating a murderous time. That he also happens to be an Irish Catholic priest is a major plot point in a film that has a lot to say about exploding expectations. CAHIR O’DOHERTY talks to Gleeson about this dark and difficult new thriller.

Good men rarely fare well in the epically dysfunctional Ireland of the two McDonagh brothers (both playwright and director Martin, 44, and writer and director John Michael, 46, have now carved out separate but thematically overlapping film careers).

This rule is especially true for Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson) the good man besieged by a bunch of lunatic Sligo locals in John Patrick McDonagh’s Calvary.

For both McDonaghs, who grew up in London to parents from counties Galway and Sligo, you’re rarely ever more than 10 feet away from violence, aggression, murder or mayhem. But Calvary may set a new record for villainy and heartbreak even by their own dark standards.

We’ve certainly been down this good-man-dying-for-our-sins road before in any number of westerns, but McDonagh really turns the genre on its head with some of the unexpected choices he makes and the compelling characters he creates.

Calvary got its start as shooting wrapped on The Guard, the award-winning debut feature film that Gleeson and McDonagh first collaborated on.

“We talked about the idea of a good man in the midst of all this – the abuse crisis, the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy – and how do you maintain your sense of what it is you came in to do in the first place?” Gleeson tells the Irish Voice.

One of the things to emerge from there was the need for an uplifting ending in their next film project. The times seemed to demand it. So Gleeson sees the message of the new film as being one that’s filled with compassion and hope. It could even be considered heroic.

“But it’s a hard won hope. The legacy of an abusive childhood (the film’s subject matter) is a lifetime of pain. It’s not a case of let’s get on with it and forget about it as Father Leary (David Wilmot) says in the film,” Gleeson says.

“You know this notion that all this bad stuff happened 30 years ago, let’s just forget about it and get on with it, is really not a sufficient response.”

It was the duality of the film’s message that convinced Gleeson to sign up, he reveals.

“Yes there are good men working in the church who are trying to do good things. But also the damage caused by the abuse is not easily swept away.”

One of the film’s A list cast members – spoiler alert I’m not going to say who – takes it upon himself to pursue justice for an abusive childhood at the hands of a priest.

“I’m not sure he gets justice,” Gleeson interjects. “I think he gets revenge, but that’s a poisoned chalice. I really think he ends up in the same place, the same prison, as the guy in the film who is psychopathic and who eats people. I’m not sure if there’s really an awful lot of justice in that.

“What’s more important -- and again this is a spoiler alert -- there’s compassion and there is a scene of forgiveness in the end.”

Reading the script for the first time, Gleeson admits he could not see how his character could get to the point of forgiveness.

“For me it seemed too hard. But in performance I watched actress Kelly Reilly and she was so good that things progressed and it became more believable. We actually see a response,” he says.

“It would have been ‘cooler’ to have left the film with open questions, but I’m really delighted that John Michael committed to hope.”

It’s that final commitment to hope that makes his work strikingly different from his much more saturnine brothers in some ways. John Michael apparently wants to believe in the potential for hope, or at least he allows it as a possibility.

Meanwhile, Gleeson is clear about the film’s western elements in this white hats versus black hats showdown.

“Whether its Monument Valley or Ben Bulben, there’s a human scale and a mythic scale to the landscape. We look huge and we look tiny,” Gleeson says.

“There’s a Gary Cooper thing about this man absorbing all the slings and bats of his community. I think that structurally there are references to westerns.

“[McDonagh] set out very deliberately to write a non-cynical film. He embraced all the great themes and made a good man the driver of the action. I think the writing is monumental. In Ireland people appreciated the honesty, they did not feel that there was a propagandist agenda going on. Both sides were given due deference to their opinions, both had their voices heard in the movie. I’m delighted that it falls into the place where hope is possible.”

Ireland is going through a bit of a dark time at the moment, a time of coming to terms with the past. Does Gleeson think the film addresses that?

“I do, but I think that the context is more universal than that. The notion of the treachery that was visited on the people by the politicians and the banks and the clergy and all the authority figures – all the leaders – were found wanting and uncaring.”

It’s very easy to sink into bitterness and disillusionment, says Gleeson.

“We have that choice and I’m not sure if we’re avoiding it particularly. My own personal opinion is that people have to take responsibility for their own disillusionment and the have to fight it.

“Obviously leadership is needed. But as well as that we have to man up now. It’s the reason that we wanted independence, we can’t blame colonialism. It’s been 100 years, get over it.

“It’s not anyone else’s fault. We did this to ourselves. I think we have to recognize that and not be whining that it’s some historical thing. If it is we need to recognize and get over it. But we can’t blame anyone else for this one.”

At some point in Calvary all of the characters – which are portrayed by Chris O’Dowd, Aidan Gillen, Pat Shortt and others -- hold their own responsibility for their own optimism or cynicism. They’re given the choice by the priest to make a decision.

“They have his own example to make a commitment to a better way of doing things,” says Gleeson. “Call it faith, hope and charity, a belief in human kindness. His commitment to that is what they have to get on board with. They have to want to see the beauty of life. We see the limbo they’re in.”

There are very few women in the film, but the ones who do come in have a massive impact in terms of the vulnerability and strength that they exhibit. Marie Josee Croze’s character Teresa gives Father Lavelle the strength to face what he needs to face.

“That for me is a heartbreaking thing to watch. She’s the saint in the company. The solidity of her faith, even though she’s lost her husband and is deeply wounded, can be seen in her commitment to go on. It gives Father Lavelle and the film the spiritual lift it needs.”

Is McDonagh delighted with the film’s amazing critical reception and word of mouth?

“He hates the term little gem,” laughs Gleeson. “He wants the film to be seen on small screens and multiplexes. He wants the film to be able to cope with either.”

Calvary is now playing nationwide.

Film Review: 'Calvary'

BY STEVEN D. GREYDANUS

http://www.ncregister.com/

9/5/14

Calvary opens with one the most excruciating lines of dialogue I can recall ever hearing in any film. Spat through a confessional grille, it comes like a stinging slap on the face, both to the audience and to Father James Lavelle. Cautiously, the priest turns the other cheek. In doing so, he implicitly extends an invitation to viewers to do the same.

The opening scene, filmed in a single, static shot, plays as a declaration of war, both by the man behind the grille and by the man behind the camera, writer-director John Michael McDonagh. Where the man behind the grille has trained his sights is clear enough. As a boy, he was horrifically wronged by a priest and his Church; he means to return the favor. And the man behind the camera? Where are his sights set? This is not so readily apparent.

Set in County Sligo on the west coast of Ireland, Calvary confronts the impact of the clerical sex-abuse scandal on the Church in Ireland and the role of the Church in increasingly secular, post-Christian Ireland.

Father James’ antagonist has been deeply wounded by childhood sexual abuse. He has chosen a curious form of revenge: He wants to murder a priest: not a bad priest, he clarifies, but a good one, one who hasn’t harmed him or anyone else. The murder of a bad priest wouldn’t be enough of a statement; it wouldn’t hurt the Church the way he intends to. He will give Father James a week to set his affairs in order, and then kill him the next Sunday. “Killing a priest on a Sunday,” he muses, tickled. “That’s a good one.”

Sometimes misleadingly described as a dark comedy, Calvary is certainly dark, and there are sporadic bits of absurdist humor. In keeping with its title, though, it really is a passion play, with Father James as an innocent victim to be sacrificed for the sins of the Church.

McDonagh has called the film “basically Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest with a few gags thrown in,” and the film name-checks Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos, whose novel Bresson’s film is based on. Like Diary of a Country Priest, Calvary is about a good priest in a small village where attitudes toward him range from benign indifference to contempt and abuse.

Yet where Bresson’s saintly protagonist was a wan young consumptive who could be wounded by something as minor as a saucy schoolgirl impudently flirting with him, Father James — played by the physically imposing Brendan Gleeson in a grizzled beard and cassock that makes him an even more formidable presence — is a battered Celtic warrior who seems impossible to rattle.

Consider his response to that dreadful opening line: He doesn’t wilt or wither; he doesn’t fall over himself to offer apologies or consolations the man doesn’t want. He recognizes that the man wants to be heard, and he listens.

That, in essence, is how Father James spends what may be his last week: trying to discern in each encounter, in each situation, what is needed, what would be most helpful, or at least what would do the least damage. It is not an easy task, for while many people may need him, almost nobody wants him.

He is a bit of a therapist, constable, assistant, marriage counselor and sounding board. At times, he is even a priest; he is also a literal father, with a troubled adult daughter (Kelly Reilly), for he is a late vocation and a widower.

Making things worse rather than better, Father James shares pastoral duties with a younger priest who is alarmingly negligent with the seal of confession and queasily ingratiating toward a local tycoon who may make a sizable donation to salve his own conscience. Eventually, Father James matter-of-factly slaps his assistant priest with an indictment as blunt and dismissive (though not so dramatic) as Thomas More’s damning line to Richard Rich midway through A Man for All Seasons (“Richard, you couldn’t answer for yourself even so far as tonight”).

Watching Father James, I am reminded at turns of two other tales with clerical protagonists who persevere in the face of apparent ineffectuality: Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and Louis Buñuel’s Nazarín. Ah, but those are two stories with two very different morals.

Greene gives us a frail whisky priest whose fragile tenacity in doing the right thing in the absence of any sense of achievement (from the satisfaction of having clearly helped anyone to the consolation of feeling he has pleased God) is the mark of his moral triumph. By contrast, Buñuel offers an upright, charismatic man of the cloth whose ineffectiveness despite his great integrity can be taken as an indictment of the irrelevance of religion.

What about Calvary? Is Father James more like Greene’s whisky priest or Buñuel’s Padre Nazario? Does his dogged perseverance in the teeth of apathy and hostility bespeak heroic virtue or quixotic futility?

The question is complicated by a key difference between Calvary and Diary of a Country Priest: the ambiguity of the denouement. Where Bresson’s protagonist emerges at the far side of his dark night of the soul with a profound experience of transcendence and an unambiguous affirmation that “all is grace,”Calvary ends, in a way, with what might be called a question mark.

As the film ends, there are glimpses of people unaware of the climactic confrontation between the priest and his would-be assassin; and then a crucial word that will soon be spoken between two characters, neither Father James — a word that will tell in some way whether the priest’s convictions and principles ultimately made a difference where it counts most — is not related. In that sense, the priest’s triumph or failure is left open.

Yet it is Father James, alone among the cast, who offers a persuasive, integral, authentic example of what a human being should look like: too honest for cant, too jaded for naiveté, too self-aware for illusions, too solicitous for self-absorption, too fallen for self-righteousness, too down-to-earth for self-importance. I’d have bet money Deliver Us From Evil had a lock on the best movie priest of the year, but Calvary proved me wrong.

His observations are not just orthodox; they are wise. Some of the wisest are also the tersest and simplest. His daughter struggles with clinical depression and has attempted suicide. When he asks her at one point if she thought about those she would have left behind, she replies defiantly, “I belong only to myself.”

“True,” he admits candidly; then, with equal conviction, “False.”

Although he rarely loses his temper or raises his voice, he is pushed too far ministering to a young serial killer (Gleeson’s son Domhnall Gleeson, Bill Weasley from the last two Harry Potter films) by the killer’s rhapsodic remark about “becoming God” while watching the light go out in a victim’s eyes. “No!” the priest barks sharply. “You don’t.”

Surrounded by eccentric, often perverse, caricatures who put the priest through a grueling gauntlet of abuse and humiliation, Father James is the target of considerable authorial harassment. Yet, despite a lapse or two, he retains his dignity, credibility and even, crucially, his sense of humor.

Along the way, he extends to the people of his community, not what he wants for them or thinks they need, but what would actually benefit them. An essay at First Things went so far as to suggest that Calvary made “a case for the necessity of the institutional priesthood.” That’s probably going too far, but certainly the film proposes that a religious vocation lived with integrity offers not only a viable path for a life well lived, but one that can be of genuine service to others if they are open to it.

Why, then, the ambiguous denouement? Shouldn’t a film as obviously allegorical as Calvary have the courage to end with a definite statement?

Perhaps it makes more sense to regard the film not as an allegory, but as a parable.

Consider the Parable of the Prodigal Son — or, as it has more aptly been called, the Parable of the Two Sons. The parable ends with the younger son’s journey complete, but the elder son is left up in the air, for what happens next is up to those to whom the parable was told, who are in the position of the elder brother.

“We have too much talk about sins, to be honest, and not enough about virtues,” Father James remarks in a moment of high duress. “I think forgiveness has been highly underrated.”

This is the word we hope will win out in the denouement. To the extent that we have been wronged, as characters in the film have been wronged, is this the word that will win out in our lives?

Steven D. Greydanus is the Register’s film critic and creator of Decent Films.
He is studying for the permanent diaconate for the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey.
Follow him on Twitter.

Caveat Spectator: Graphic sexual dialogue; heavy obscene language; some disturbing and graphic violent imagery; a depiction of cocaine use. Adults.