Toronto Dispatch. 7.

Deliver Us From Evil in the Real to Reel section is that rare film about the topic of priest abuse of children in which the filmmaker actually gets the priest who abused those kids to talk. In this case, the priest is Oliver O'Grady, an Irish cleric who worked in parishes in California in the 1970s and 1980s. He is interviewed in Ireland, where he has gone presumably to avoid having charges brought upon himself, and to avoid having attention brought to the superiors who enabled him to stay in parishes for so long while they knew he was abusing children. In this case, the abuse victims were girls.

What we have is a case history, or case histories, with a spectrum of elements that add up to a troubling story - a priest who violates a position of trust; teenage girls, now women, whose lives were taken from them; devout parents who resisted for a long time in believing that priests could be the predators that so many of them turned out to be; and a church hierarchy, including the present cardinal of Los Angeles, Roger Mahony, whose priority still seems to be escaping any kind of accountability.

Why Father O'Grady chose to talk to the filmmaker, Amy Berg, is a mystery that only his confessor must know. But the fact that he speaks frankly about sexually abusing girl after girl doesn't explain the reasons why he did it in the first place. Everyone has sexual urges. Not everyone is a rapist. The account of encounter after encounter with vulnerable parishioners is a trail of tears when you hear the victims talk about it. As much as we hear about the same abuse from O'Grady himself - who has been described as "charming" in a few of the reviews that I've seen - the mystery of predation still remains a mystery. (It's also a mystery in Little Children, Todd Field's drama in which a convicted pedophile lives under siege from a man who wants him dead.)

There is no film about priest abuse that's gotten this kind of access before. The only parallel, imperfect as it is, was Twist of Faith, Kirby Dick's film of two years ago, which looked at the effect on a young firefighter, now a father in Ohio, who was preyed upon by priests. Dick got access to the victims, poignant access. But the priests avoided him, as did the bishops who supervised them. What they couldn't keep him from was a videotaped deposition in which priests discuss their misdeeds under oath. It's rare.  In most cases that are settled out of court, these depositions are closed and locked away, if not destroyed. So we're often left just with the victim's version of things and language often fails when a person is talking about a tragedy that's ruined his or her life. In Deliver Us From Evil, the sinner speaks and forgiveness won't come quickly.

It was pointed out by a friend of mine, who went to the Galway Film Festival, that news of the doc and of the priest's name was published in the Irish press just as the festival opened. The Irish, who had resigned themselves to being powerless as priests abused their power, were appalled. I imagine Father O'Grady's phone is still ringing, if he hasn't disconnected it.

See Deliver Us From Evil if you want to get deeper into the details of yet another crisis that's been pushed off the front page as each crisis of the week usurps that media space. Be forewarned that the film includes a sanctimonious trip by the victims to the Vatican to hold the church hierarchy accountable, to no avail. If you're still interested in finding out more, go to the Boston Globe, whose investigative team led by Walter Robinson broke open the story of priest abuse and the tolerance of that abuse in Boston. The newspaper coverage shamed the church. It helped sustain lawsuits by victims that broke the bank of the archdiocese and drove Cardinal John Law out of town to Rome, where he was given a comfortable job by the Pope.

A brief note on Black Book, Paul Verhoeven's thriller about duplicity and survival in war-time Holland under the Nazis. I've heard from people - who didn't see the film, of course - that Verhoeven's melodrama is just another exploitation film. That seems to be the conventional wisdom out there. The cliché of choice is that this is one Holocaust film with a lot of nudity. You can't expect people who haven't seen a movie to be anywhere close to accurate when they start trashing it and its director, but I'll warn any of you that, if you think you're going to see Shoah Girls, you'll be extremely disappointed, although you've probably already heard through the rumor mill that there is a scene in which a character dyes her pubic hair blonde to avoid being detected as a Jew.

You'll certainly be disappointed with the Dutch, if you think most of them behaved admirably either during the Nazi occupation or during the months immediately following the liberation. Verhoeven can expect to make about as many friends in Holland as he has in Hollywood these days. Yet I still think Verhoeven has made an admirable film. As for my colleagues who take issue with the nudity, this is a film about a Jewish woman who uses sexuality to survive, going undercover into an affair with a Gestapo leader. The improbable element here is that she falls in love with him. The sexuality and the nudity that we see from time to time are part of that story. (Funny that these prudes aren't squeamish about horrifically violent scenes of mass murder in Black Book.) I'm sure there's a more prudish version of the same story that could be made. There always is, once the studios, the MPAA raters, and the critics have something to say about it. It would not be as worth watching as Verhoeven's drama. Let's hope it gets distributed in the US.

Posted by dwhudson at September 18, 2006 12:25 AM