NR | 1 h 36 min | Noir | 2023
Screenwriter-producer-director Paul Roland cares enough about faith, reconciliation, redemption, and truth to discuss these boldly and lovingly in his debut film. Why lovingly? Mr. Roland isn’t so much challenging a conviction in these ideals as clarifying them so that, once clarified, that conviction can grow stronger. Fittingly, he dedicates the film to his beloved wife.
An opening voiceover speaks of a priest of “deep devotion and … deep impiety … whose faith would be determined at the crossroads of both. This is his story.” An opening text explains the word “exemplum:” “An example or model. An anecdote that illustrates or supports a moral point, as in a … sermon.”
Heady with success as a social media evangelical sensation within the unsensational corridors of most Catholic dioceses, Father Colin Jacobi (Paul Roland) comes up against a high-powered bishop (offscreen) restraining his swelling popularity. It hurts that this episcopal order, shutting down his social-media platforms and shunting him to another parish, comes from a worldly bishop who covered up clerical sexual abuse. Worse, it’s delivered to him by his trusted confessor, Father Liam (Francis Cronin).
Cut to the quick, Colin has a fling with pretty Lilly (Brittany Lewis). Too bad about his vow of chastity. He then takes his fight into cyber corridors he thinks he knows, striking a Faustian bargain with an enigmatic, faceless hacker, Night Owl. Colin’s been taping sacramental confessions, defying his vow of secrecy.
Now, armed with Night Owl’s clicks-and-tricks, Colin threatens to turn influential parishioner Louie Costa’s (Joseph Griffin) tape against him unless Louie persuades the bishop to relent. Amid a contested divorce with his wife, Louie’s admission in the confessional, even to a priest, about wanting to kill his wife would be disastrous. The law doesn’t care that his words were wishful thinking, not crime.
Night Owl leads Louie to believe that his business rivals are behind it all. Perhaps revenge is a way out? But Louie is firm. He won’t ruin other lives to protect himself. Then, the chaos that Colin figured he’d conjure and get away with engulfs him.
Daring Debut
Why is Mr. Roland’s film bold?Father Liam says, “You’re a priest at a time when it’s very unpopular to be one.” Mr. Roland not only picks a priest as protagonist, but expects largely cynical contemporary audiences to empathize with him. It works. You care for Colin.
Mr. Roland is bold on several fronts. A graduate from Cal State Northridge, he didn’t major in film, yet wrote six screenplays (different genres, budgets), hoping for backers; without connections in Hollywood, he found none. Still, instead of the safer route of a short film as a teaser test case, he plunged all in with a full-length feature, drawing on his early career with Catholic and conservative media.
Mr. Roland has confessed that his shoestring $9,500 budget stifled his artistic freedom, compelling his product to match his resources, not the other way around. In interviews, he said that, when forced to choose locations in Pasadena that were “naturally dressed,” including St. Andrews Catholic Church (built in the 1800s), he decided to “guerilla style everything else.” He shot his film about good and evil in black-and-white partly for artistic reasons. Yes, it was cheaper, but fewer hues also suited his genre of choice: noir.
At 6 feet 4 inches tall, Roland is built like a heavyweight boxer or a wrestler, with the easy gait of a powerful pitcher. He’s most convincing during his switch to rogue priest, even if he’s wooden before it. He’s surest as screenwriter, relying on sarcasm and irony to make his point. Guilt-ridden Colin says of his cache of tapes, “The very things I was entrusted to absolve, I froze in time.”
To dismiss the screenplay as too downbeat is to miss the point. Hacking here represents the nature of evil, threatening to reveal the truth, but all the while subverting and attacking it. The traditions of priesthood and confession here represent ironclad counterpoints, preserving, protecting, and promoting the truth in a setting of forgiving love that heals both penitents and priests at once. Never mind perverse priests and penitents.
Mr. Roland’s most redeeming messages lie in Colin’s exchanges with Liam. Colin laments the years he thinks he’s lost, devoted to a God he believes has deserted him, not asking if he was devoted to himself all along instead. Colin’s street-fighter threat, “You confessed to the wrong priest, Mr. Costa,” doesn’t ask whether he was actually a priest in the first place.
As Liam implies on sanctifying grace, it isn’t the priest who pardons, but God through him. When grace bathes a penitent on his knees, a priest’s job is to allow it to flow through him. Or get out of the way.
