SEAL OF APPROVAL, or: TAKING A SELKIE, or: IRISH I COULD HAVE COME UP WITH MORE BAD PUNS

To begin by asking the least burning question of them all: is Song of the Sea better than The Secret of Kells? I'm inclined to say no. There's the ol' "form follows content" argument, which would have it that Kells uses a visual aesthetic that is intimately derived from its primary subject, the illuminated Book of Kells; Song of the Sea doesn't look quite exactly the same, but it's extremely close, and it lacks the same tight connection between style subject. Besides, when The Secret of Kells came out, it was like nothing else I'd ever seen. Song of the Sea is like one thing I've ever seen. Which makes it, like, half as original.

But small-minded pedantry aside, Song of the Sea is still absolutely astounding, a more than worthy follow-up for director Tomm Moore and studio Cartoon Saloon, the creators of Kells. Once again, the action takes place under the shadow of Irish folklore, though Song of the Sea departs from its predecessor by taking place in something close but maybe not quite equal to the modern day (the closest thing to a giveaway is the presence of a handheld cassette player in two scenes). It's the story of two siblings: Ben (David Rawle), bitterly resentful that his now six-year-old sister came into the world the same night that his beloved mother (Lisa Hannigan) left it; and Saoirse, who does not speak, and is the sole focal point of anything resembling emotional engagement from the kids' father Conor (Brendan Gleeson), though it only resembles it a little bit. The lot of them live alone on an island a short boat trip from the Irish coast, tending a lighthouse, and in Saoirse's case, staring with rapt attention at the population of seals that has arrived in those waters for the first time in many years.

The reason for this is not merely that the seals are unbearably goddamn cute - they are, though cuter still is Ben's big sloppy sheepdog Cú - but that Saoirse, it turns out, is half-selkie, and her and Ben's mother was a full selkie, which has something to do with why she disappeared (this theoretically means that Ben, too, is half-selkie, but as the design makes clear, he takes after his father). And what, pray tell, is a selkie? those of you unversed in North Sea folklore are perhaps asking. The short answer is a kind of were-seal. The long answer, in this film's telling, is that the selkie is the link between water and land, and she must sing her songs while wearing her selkie coat in order to keep the fierce Owl Witch at bay. Since Saoirse doesn't speak, and since Conor has taken great lengths to keep her coat hidden, this proves to be a bit a of a problem. Even moreso when an apparent accident on the night that Saoirse first manifests as a selkie leads her bossy grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan) decides that the children need to be taken to her home in Dublin for their own safety.

It is, in truth, basic children's fantasy boilerplate, buoyed up at the narrative level more because Will Collins script, from Moore's story, is full of flippant humor than because it is very surprising, and deepened more from the richness of the voice acting than the probing writing. And I think the filmmakers know this - that, in fact, they were deliberately writing something simple and uncomplicated so that its mythic elements would be more richly accessible. For it's a love letter to Irish folklore through and through; that, and a series of impressions and variations on a theme by Miyazaki Hayao (there's unexpectedly rich veins of Spirited Away in the film's bones), played on Gaelic instruments. Its relative spareness as a work of screenwriting is clearly tied into that desire to make something with the simple clarity of a fairy tale - a characteristic it shares with The Secret of Kells - though with a more complex moral code based on the fervent belief that everybody is ultimately trying to good, it's simply that not everybody necessarily understands how to do that (the film's most overtly Miyazakian element).

I run the risk of selling the film short: it achieves its storytelling goals beautifully, sketching out characters with a few key personality traits that get developed as they move through the disconnected sketches of adventure. I do not mind saying that as it drew to its conclusion, I spontaneously began to well up with some manner of proto-tears. The important thing to keep in mind, is whatever its appeal or lack to adults, Song of the Sea is a children's movie: an extraordinarily good one. Almost certainly the best of 2014. And it has the elemental storytelling of a bedtime story, something that it flags for us from literally the first minutes, which are about the telling of a bedtime story.

Meanwhile, it is breathtakingly beautiful - if I am being honest, probably more beautiful on the level of pure color and shape than Kells. The opening sequence is fuzzy and almost chalky-looking, suggesting the mural painted by mother and son to share the story of the selkie with the unborn baby; the remainder is crisp, brightly-saturated colors with flat shapes and spaces: this movie is unabashedly proud to be two-dimensional. It copies the salient aspect of Kells, mixing side views with overhead views that make a hash of perspective lines and three-dimensional geography; a trick Moore and company picked up from medieval art. And again, it's not entirely clear where the relationship between the style and the story here lies. other than a few moments that hearken back to that opening mural, the aesthetic feels not quite perfect: a little too primitive to actually feel like picturebook illustration, which sometimes appears to be the intent. Or perhaps I'm simply too ignorant of Irish folk art to know what I'm looking at, which I frankly prefer to believe.

For regardless of how well it "fits", Song of the Sea is simply too gorgeous for words. The characters have just a trace of anime influence in their eyes and faces, the backgrounds are wildly abstracted using the distinctive lines and stylised representations of Celtic illuminations. There's not a single frame that isn't lovely, regardless of what else is going on: whether it's funny, adorable, spooky (which happens surprisingly, and gratifyingly, often), or even if it's in one of the film's handful of patchy, slowed-down moments where the folktale structure works against its best interests. It's very special film; in love with its characters, its story, the traditions underpinning that story; and allowing the characters to be full of love and warmth themselves. I'd be a damn liar to call it perfect or particularly innovative, but it's the kind of comfortingly challenging work that represents cinema animation at its most ambitious, and a simply lovely, tender drama on top of it.

9/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: THIS TURBULENT PRIEST

Titling one's movie Calvary, as writer-director John Michael McDonagh has done in his second feature (and also the second entry in his project to give amazing lead roles to Brendan Gleeson), boxes things in pretty well. It has to be a film with a walking, talking Christ surrogate, pretty much, and Calvary's is a doozy: Father James (Gleeson), one of two priests in a rural Irish parish, who spends the film's opening scene taking confession from one of his flock who bluntly announces an intention to kill the priest the following Sunday. And this is specifically because Father James is so totally, undeniably innocent of any wrongdoing of any kind, that the killer has chosen him to be the pure sacrificial lamb to atone for the sins of a Church that hasn't sufficiently acknowledged its sin of allowing pedophiles the protection of the cloth.

In another universe, this could serve as the opening to a crackling thriller about a targeted innocent hunting down his unknown assailant, a kind of religious-themed D.O.A.; but my oh my, that's not even slightly the film McDonagh had in mind to make. Fairly early on, Father James speaks to his bishop (David McSavage), and acknowledges that he recognised the man's voice in the confessional; so much for being a mystery. And despite having this knowledge, and being informed by the bishop that this situation doesn't fall under the sanctity protecting those in the confessional (the would-be killer not showing any desire to atone), Father James shows no interest in stopping his assailant. Instead, he spends what may very well be the last week of his life trying to do the best he can to better the lives of those in his small community, and to feel his way around the broken relationship between himself and his daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly), born prior to his entry into the priesthood upon the occasion of his wife's death.

Calvary is, if this doesn't seem like an artificial construction, an extremely lapsed-Catholic movie. It could only possibly have been made in a country dominated by Catholicism and by a native of that country; as much as it is concerned with any other topic under the sun, the film is obsessively interested in the waning authority of the Church in a place where it once was simply assumed to be the primary force guiding the lives of everyone living there. It's a film whose characters and story are so nakedly symbolic that it doesn't care even a little bit if that symbolism gets overbearing or trumps the realistic logic of the scenario, which I will confess to finding immensely rewarding. Grappling with national religious identity in the form of a character study is not a task for the squeamish or the subtle, and for all its political cartoon filing of characters into types like The Atheist, Dr. Frank Harte (Aiden Gillen), The Rich Man, Michael Fitzgerald (Dylan Moran), The Foreigner, Simon (Isaach De Bankolé), and so on, there's an organic texture to the way that Calvary assembles and cycles through its characters that keeps it from feeling forced or overly messagey.

As the center of this swirl of metaphorical approaches to the Church's role in modern times, Gleeson has to play three layers all at once, two of them wholly symbolic, and still make Father James feel like an actual, plausible human being. The film cheats its way into it: McDonagh's script unabashedly conforms itself to the actor and makes use of all his best skills, without having to necessarily tax Gleeson to do much more than stand with his mournful beardy expression in some of the quieter moments. Then again, McDonagh and Gleeson developed the character and the script together, so the work of creating a character goes deeper than just standing in front of a camera and reciting lines, in this case. However it came to be, Gleeson is absolutely devastating in the role, one of the great triumphs of commanding screen presence of the year. Evoking Father James's inner fear and resignation and willingness to assume guilt through long wordless stretches and the heavy way he carries his body, Gleeson provides the movie with all the shape and focus it needs to carry off its broad ambitions.

Not that he's the whole movie, or anything; frequently, he's put in an entirely reactive role to the splashy characters surrounding him. The film loves its supporting characters: it gives all of them big showcase moments and all the best lines of tart dialogue, adding a pitch-black hilarity that keeps the film from feeling too damn serious too often. A film about religion, religious institutions, and pessimistic faith though it is, Calvary is grounded in the messy stuff of day-to-day humanity, and its stately movement from one character to the next as each scene glides by gives all of its humans a chance to shine.

Larry Smith's grey-washed cinematography lends a sense of terrible Romantic grandeur to the Irish landscapes (an easy thing to do, in fairness) and aging interiors alike reinforcing and deepening the shifting emotions of the story, while Chris Gill's editing provides a crisp momentum that draws us unto scenes, and carefully shapes our relationship to James. So for for all that it's driven by ideas and screenwriterly conceits, it doesn't drop the ball on being a well-built piece of cinema. The ideas are what count most, though: they're a bit bleak at times and willing to let theme triumph over characters every so often (including, probably, the ending shots), but presented with impressive thoughtfulness and intellectual grounding, and just enough humor that it doesn't burn on the way down. It is, in more than a few ways, an Irish Catholic variant on the scorched-earth Swedish Lutheranism of Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light; not a recipe for a breezy fun time at the movies, but when you're in the mood to really grapple, I mean, just grapple with religion and sociology and dense character acting, you could hardly find anything better in the contemporary cinema landscape.

8/10

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