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Priest

Reviewed by James H. Krefft

Released UK 1994, US 1995; director, Antonia Bird; screenwriter, Jimmy McGovern; actors,Linus Roache, Tom Wilkinson, Robert Carlyle, Cathy Tyson, Lesley Sharp.

The opening allegorical sequence of Priest makes clear from the get-go that this movie intends to body slam the hypocrisy of the Church’s magisterial positions on priests and sexuality.  Oh, where is the Legion of Decency when you really need it?  And the Swiss guards.

A supposedly washed-up, elderly parish priest prays devoutly in his church and makes his own way of the cross, parading through the slums of Liverpool with a near-bout life sized crucifix.  His destination: the bishop’s residence, where the forced-out pastor tilts the crucifix forward like a lance and charges full speed across the greenest lawn you’ll ever see, targeting a leaded glass window in the bishop’s office, vocalizing with a yell that would make any gray bellied Confederate cavalryman proud, finally penetrating the sacred hideout.  What an opening.

The handsome Father Greg (Linus Roache), recently ordained, arrives at the Liverpool parish to replace the chivalric retired pastor and quickly observes that the new pastor, Father Matthew (Tom Wilkinson), has something going with the exotically attractive housekeeper, Maria (Cathy Tyson).  Father Greg sanctimoniously upbraids his pastor for living in sin, and Father Matthew parries by throwing spitballs at the Church’s medieval insistence on a celibate clergy.  It’s more fun than watching kickboxing.  The faithful Maria dodges their sarcastic gibes and keeps on loving her men – and doing their laundry and dishes.  How she manages to look so sexy in outfits that couldn’t make it to a back rack of a Goodwill store is beyond me.

Oops!  What’s this?  Late night and the holier-than-thou Father Greg doffing his Roman collar and donning a tailored leather jacket and tight pants to cruise smoky dim lit gay bars?  I thought he protested too much.  After ogling Graham (Robert Carlyle) across the crowd of swaying man couples and slow dancing with him, Father Greg ends up in bed with Graham.  Graham wants more than a one night roll in the hay, but Father Greg has vital priestly duties to attend to.  He leaves Graham longing for more early the next morning so he can get back to his parish to say Mass.  Duty before booty.  Don’t you just love a committed hypocrite?

Meanwhile, Father Greg hears the confession of a schoolgirl who tells him that her father has been raping her for years.  For years.  What to do?  Seems like Father Greg’s Roman collar has a chokehold on his sense of morality.  The Seal of Confession.  Can’t commit one sin to prevent another sin, can we?  Even to save an innocent child.  Rules are rules, after all.

In the seminary Father Greg was taught that a priest can never, ever, never ever violate the confidence of the confessional, and he cites a trite moral catch-22 as on-point exemplum: what if a sociopath confessed to a priest that he (the sinner) had dropped belladonna into the sacred wine?  Oh, yes, grasshopper.  The confessor, under pain of defrocking, would have to go ahead and (gulp) swallow the lethal vino.  Better dead than defrocked.  Who said God doesn’t have a sense of humor?  Me, I’d reach through the confessional grate, wrap my purple silk stole around his neck, and drag his ass downtown.  But I digress.

For biting grins, the girl’s mum (Lesley Sharp) adores the cute (and buff) Father Greg and works elbow to elbow with him on a parish committee.  The committee meeting exchanges drip with ethical irony.  Unable (unwilling) to rat out the predator dad because of the Seal of Confession, Father Greg decides to go back door (ouch) by scrubbing one of the committee meetings early, knowing that the girl’s mother will likely stumble on her husband abusing their daughter.

She does.  She gets home to find a fire in the kitchen, smoke everywhere, and a shrieking smoke alarm.  Amazing imagery.  You know what she’s about to discover, but it’ll still drive shivers down your spine.  Mum opens the bedroom door, sees pater raping their daughter, and simultaneously implodes and explodes.  Her volcanic outrage is one of the most heartbreaking, haunting scenes you’ll ever see in film.

Moments later, mum tracks down Father Greg giving religious instruction to students in church (it just doesn’t get any better than this) and lets him have it, and when I say she lets him have it, I mean, she lets him have it.  He’s shaken to the point where he wants to get laid, and so he chases down Graham.  It must be love.  Or, to paraphrase the late Flip Wilson’s irrepressible Geraldine, perhaps the devil made him do it.

Father Greg’s double standard comes to a head (sorry) when patrolling Bobbies bust Greg and Graham at the submarine races and the local rag splashes the priest’s picture across the front page.  The parishioners, secretly (wink, wink) tolerant of Father Matthew’s swarthy concubine, go ballistic, and the pompous bishop exiles Father Greg to the sheep-farming hinterlands of the English moors.  Talk about retribution.  If you’ve ever tried to sidestep sheep doo-doo at Hadrian’s wall, you know what I’m talking about.

Father Greg’s new pastor welcomes him by excoriating him in Latin (take that) and later posts himself as a chaperone when Father Matthew comes a-calling to plead with Father Greg to return to the Liverpool parish and face down the cacophony of outraged churchgoers.  The two mates get roaring drunk and feign rollicking intimacy while the prudish pastor twists and turns in his bed.  Now we know what Scotch is really for.

Father Greg ends it with Graham and returns to Liverpool, but only after cutting the priggish vicar with a final insult, in Latin.  Although it’s been decades since I took Latin, I retained enough to appreciate the slight.  It took Father Greg a while, but he did Latin scholars proud.  Back in Liverpool the next Sunday, the two priests concelebrate Mass as a symbol of solidarity against the Church’s repressive self-righteousness.

Father Matthew takes the pulpit and pleads with the malcontents to forgive their lost sheep returned, giving as passionate a digest of Christ’s dictum to “love one another” as you’ll see on film.  Most churchgoers reject the appeal for forgiveness (shocking, isn’t it?), and Father Matthew lets them have it as they turn their backs and stomp out.  See those Christians, how they love one another.

Others, including the girl who had been raped by her dad, embrace the pastor’s message and stay for the rest of Mass.  But they’ve still got a ways to go in the absolution department.  In one of the most emotionally charged wrap scenes I’ve ever seen, the remaining Christians deliver a final snub of their own.  When the two priests step down from the altar to give Holy Communion, everyone in the church lines up on Father Matthew’s side of the aisle.  No one wants to take Communion from a gay priest, even if he’s begged for forgiveness.  “Forgive one another, as I have forgiven you,” oh, unless we don’t wanna.  As Father Matthew repeats “The Body of Christ” and the faithful respond “Amen,” Father Greg puts on a brave face, and shakes.

Finally, finally, the girl who had been raped by her father steps out of a pew, walks calmly forward, and stands before Father Greg.  “The Body of Christ.”  “Amen.”  In a torrid eruption of pain and love, and forgiveness, he collapses bawling into her arms.  If you don’t cry here, crack your superego over the noggin and get your lack of libido examined.