Priest
With Linus Roache, Tom Wilkinson, Cathy Tyson, Robert Carlyle, James Ellis, Lesley Sharp, Robert Pugh, and Christine Tremarco.
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At the presbytery Father Greg meets Father Matthew (Tom Wilkinson), another older priest, and almost immediately the political and temperamental differences between the two are spelled out, when Greg delivers his first sermon. Defining “society” as the contemporary scapegoat for people trying to shirk their moral responsibilities, Greg quickly establishes himself as a by-the-book neoconservative. Matthew–who sleeps with the presbytery’s nonwhite housekeeper, does karaoke singing at the local pub, and later gives an aggressive sermon Greg compares to “a political broadcast for the Labour Party”–has a more progressive agenda.
Before we’ve had any chance to ponder this further, we’re thrown another curveball. A 14-year-old girl named Lisa (Christine Tremarco) tells Greg in the confessional that her father’s been forcing her to have sex with him. “Tell him you’ve seen me, and I’ve said it’s got to stop,” Father Greg tells her; but shortly afterward, during a school performance, her father taps him on the shoulder and says, “Keep your nose out of my business.” A little later the father turns up in the confessional himself to boast to Greg: “Incest is human–it’s the most natural thing in the world.”
The movie hurtles from one outsize crisis to another, from an apparent miracle to a denunciation that seems to rule out divine intervention to an arrest that seems predicated on mental telepathy: it’s as if we were being administered a series of rude slaps. By the time Greg attempts suicide, the issue of whether the movie is challenging yet another church doctrine–suicide as a mortal sin–isn’t even addressed. Given the movie’s crowded agenda, the narrative is delivered in shorthand; in effect Priest is a feature-length trailer for the miniseries that never got made.
