Week Of June 19, 2006 - Mon / Wed / Fri

June 21, 2006

Pedophile priest documentaries, like the current wave of Iraq documentaries, begin to seem ubiquitous after a while. It is said that more than 100,000 American children have been molested by these broken souls. The church chooses to cover up endlessly. And so it makes for an obvious source of inspiration.

The last great pedophile priest documentary was Kirby Dick's Twist of Faith, which told the story of a firefighter in his 40s with a family and kids who is forced to confront what happened to him as a child when the priest moves to a nearby home. The victim, Tony Comes, still showed his pain, however much he had become the idealized picture of manhood. And by focusing on him and not the priest - who was neither available nor explicable - the film became greater than a simple attack. It reeked of a raw, agonized humanity.

I first met Amy Berg when she became the producer of a KABC radio show that George Pennacchio and I used to host. She went on to produce investigative news segments at KCBS and then at CNN, here in L.A. When she first expressed her interest in going out and making a feature length doc on her own, she had some fun, interesting commercial ideas. Then one day, maybe a year after the last conversation I had with her about her aspirations, I got a phone call telling me she was making this movie, Deliver Us From Evil. Would I look at the trailer? I did (and you can here) and I was hooked right off.

When I finally saw the complete film (I still haven't seen a final, final cut and I won't until the movie premieres at the LA Film Festival on Saturday Night), I was blown away.

What is unique about Amy's film is that she has the priest. Father Ollie O'Grady molested Nancy Sloan 30 summers ago. It was his first molestation that ended up on record. And when he was caught, he was told to write a letter explaining himself. He still has that note. Nancy Sloan still has that note. Time has passed, but the wounds have not. Father O'Grady seems almost happy to be telling his story. Nancy Sloan doesn't seem happy at all.

I felt all flushed with fever,
Embarrassed by the crowd,
I felt he found my letters and read each one out loud.
I prayed that he would finish,
But he just kept right on strumming my pain with his fingers,
Singing my life with his words,
Killing me softly with his song,
Killing me softly with his song,
Telling my whole life with his words,
Killing me softly with his song

Soon after Nancy Sloan, Father O'Grady was moved from Lodi, CA to Turlock, CA by the church. No one in Turlock was warned about his problem. After he was caught again, he was moved to Stockton, and then again to San Andreas, where he was given a promotion.

The thing about Father O'Grady is that you couldn't cast him better. He is one of the sweetest, kindest, warmest looking men you will ever see on film, with a shock of white hair and a twinkle in his blue eyes.

And this makes Ollie O'Grady one of the great movie villains of all time. He really doesn't think he is a villain. He is just a "people person." The look in his eye when he explains what turns him on is indescribable. The smirk on his face when he explains how his sins will be absolved by his asking forgiveness is stomach turning.

Ms. Berg takes on the subject with not only O'Grady's cooperation, but the cooperation of a number of the victims and their families. The victims tell their stories, filled with rage and the still-strong scent of guilt that they haven't earned. They are in their 30s and 40s now. And they each have their own level of ability to discuss what happened and what has happened in their lives since.

Enter the Church which, aside from O'Grady, is captured mostly on deposition tapes now in the public domain. Each official is more arrogant than the last, but what is really chilling is how you can see in their faces that they are like children who were caught with their hands in the cookie jars. They knew. But how far are they willing to go to silence this story?

The film makes the case very effectively that Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles is completely culpable in what happened with Oliver O'Grady. And, ultimately, the finger points at the new pope, previously Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who wrote to bishops worldwide, according to the AP, "explaining that 'grave' crimes such as the sexual abuse of minors would be handled by his congregation and that the proceedings of special church tribunals handling the cases were subject to 'pontifical secret.'" One lawsuit stemming from those letters was kicked out of court after Ratzinger became Pope, now exempt under international law as the head of state of Vatican City.

Also, critical to the story are Bob and Maria Jyono, who supported O'Grady when he came to California from his native Ireland, which is also where Maria was from. They loved Father O'Grady. They believed in Father O'Grady. They were close friends of Father O'Grady's for about 15 years. Are they ready to face the truth? What happens when they are confronted with that truth?

Ms. Berg, supported ably by editor Matthew Cooke, makes a movie here that also has the advantage of looking like a real movie, not an I-got-a-digital-camera-so-I'll-make-a-film knock-off. The camerawork is solid and the images powerful and often startlingly beautiful. At times, the images seem to want to allow you the time to consider what you are trying to digest and to, really, pray over it. The score, by Mick Harvey (perhaps best known for his collaborations with Nick Cave), is also mesmerizing.

But still, in the end, for me this is a movie about the worst kind of monster… one who has no idea that he is a monster… and who takes the lives of his victims and those around them, but not by murdering them, but by leaving them alive to linger in their unrecoverable life. No fava beans. No nice Chianti.

Deliver Us From Evil is like a documentary action movie… every 5 minutes or so, something else makes your jaw drop to the ground. Anger, sadness, horror, sympathy, rage… it's not a light night at the movies. It's a movie that may forever change how you see something that has become a punchline to so many for so many of the reasons we have to see this film… why this problem hasn't simply ended once exposed. We don't want to look. We don't want to see. We don't want to know.

100,000 kids in America alone. It's time to look Oliver O'Grady in the eye, whether we want to or not.

E Me:

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