If you can survive the outrage, "The Boys of St. Vincent," showing for the next five nights at 7 at the Baltimore Museum of Art under the auspices of the Baltimore Film Forum's First Look series, is an absolute must-see.
Originally developed as a mini-series for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., the three-hour film excited the passions that most provocative, excellent and truthful works excite, and was promptly banned. Many lawsuits later, it was shown, to well-deserved national acclaim. In the meantime, it has been released in the United States a city at a time as a three-hour feature, to wondrous (and well-deserved) reviews everywhere.
Yet it's an extremely difficult film to endure and some people won't be able to. It's a chilly, engrossing account of a great evil: a cult of pederasty at a beloved community institution, a Catholic orphanage, where a number of priests used their roles of unquestioned moral authority as leverage by which to exploit young male children sexually. Worse, the film follows the impact into the wider community and watches how, with the connivance of the just-barely secular municipal government, the church covered up the scandal and derailed a police investigation.
The second half clicks in 15 years later and chronicles an exceedingly rough kind of justice coming to prevail, as the psychologically devastated boys -- now young men with a long ton's melancholy and woe on their shoulders -- get their day in court. Though it's classy and restrained, the movie has some pulpy secret thrills. It's the best revenge movie ever made. When the smug and protected molesters get theirs, you may find yourself roaring with sheer delight.
Derived from, but not specifically based upon, several authentic cases in Canada, the movie is at its best (or worst) in depicting the horror of small boys at the utter mercy of their molesters. The director, John N. Smith, shoots from ground level as poor Kevin Reevey answers the terrible summons: "Brother Lavin wants to see you in his office." The corridor looms above him, the halls are empty and shadowy, all is silence and menace. He enters. There, resplendent and berobed, commanding and powerful, claiming to represent God's will, is Brother Lavin, a Mephistopheles hiding behind the cloth. We see a handsome man who will put Kevin on his lap and fondle him and croon, "I'm your mommy." If Kevin objects, he will be savagely beaten.
This is but one of many such grotesque relationships that dominate the culture of St. Vincent, while to the outside world it is the very model of Christian charity and politicians line up to toady before it and the church.
Smith does some darkly daring things. Though he never shows, per se, an act of perversion, he menacingly creates the milieu and the impression of them. And, more radically, he eroticizes the boys: We see them through the debauched eye of a depraved adult as Smith puts us in the pervert's clammy shoes.
Among the monsters and victims, the film, thank god, has enough room to accommodate the odd hero. One of these is a newly hired janitor, who begins to understand what is going on and is the first to complain; he loses his job. Another is a banty little detective sergeant, who pushes the investigation forward in the face of what seems official indifference but what is actually official hostility.
But the true focus is on a boy and the man who tortures him. Child actor Johnny Morina brings almost unbearable poignancy to the role of Kevin; he knows the score exactly and fights so hard to escape, to defeat it, to not let it kill him, it will break your heart. That poignancy is continued in the grown-up Kevin, played by Sebastian Spense.
The dark prince of "The Boys of St. Vincent" is Henry Czerny as Brother Lavin. Subsequent to this performance, Czerny landed a huge role in "A Clear and Present Danger," and will almost certainly enjoy a good career playing suavely intellectual thugs. But nothing he'll ever do will rival his Brother Lavin, a creature of lust and self-loathing and, yet, at the same time, utter rigidity and reflexive tactical resources. Knowing he's damned, Brother Lavin fights onward, helpless in the grip of the obsession, unable to prevent his surrender to blasphemy. Not since Ralph Fienne's SS officer Amon Goethe in "Schindler's List" has there been a performance that makes evil so detestable and yet so seductive -- and so human.
MOVIE REVIEW
"Boys of St. Vincent"
Starring Henry Czerny and Jerry Morina
Directed by John N. Smith
Released by New Yorker Films
Unrated
*** 1/2