I dont know of any young filmmakers anywhere more interesting than the McDonagh brothers. CALVARY (2014), John Michael McDonaghs latest, is (among other things) a brilliant meditation on Catholicism and atheism in Ireland today--and treats both positions with sympathy and seriousness, without quite committing itself to one or the other. It is a VERY dark comedy, with the most obvious Irish precursor being, of course, Beckett; the less obvious one is Becketts own mentor Joyce, the greatest of all Catholic atheists (though Beckett also owes something to Kafka, the greatest of all Jewish atheists, whose presence is certainly detectable here). The relation between both McDonaghs and Brendan Gleeson seems to me to be developing into one of the great director/actor teams--I mean like John Ford & John Wayne, John Cassavetes & Gena Rowlands, Martin Scorsese & Robert de Niro. Many thanks to Alistair Newson, who first mentioned the film to me.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 16:18:03 +0000
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