A paedophile priest - and the Catholic Church's attitude to him - are the subjects of an unflinching, Oscar-nominated documentary, writes Donald Clarke
LAST month the Oscar electorate demonstrated its stubborn tendency to vote for the issue rather than the film by awarding the statuette for best documentary to Al Gore's workmanlike An Inconvenient Truth.
Those voters inclined to make clear their reasonable belief that humans cause global warming felt, presumably, that their opposition to clerical child abuse could be taken as read. Yet Amy Berg's properly appalling Deliver Us from Evil, an investigation of the circumstancing surrounding one Fr Oliver O'Grady's violation of dozens of American children, is by some margin the better film. The events addressed are
so astonishing and the characters involved - both victims and tormentors - so fascinating that Berg, formerly a TV journalist, could easily have let the story tell itself without applying any further analysis.
O'Grady, who recently returned home to Ireland after serving several years in prison, abused dozens of children while working as a parish priest in California. Each time a complaint was made, the Catholic hierarchy - whose representatives come across as deeply shifty in the archive footage - quietly moved the abuser to another parish, where, inevitably, he set about initiating further atrocities.
Berg, though constricted by the Church's inevitable decision not to participate, allows the story to emerge through contributions from those directly involved. The sequence during which Bob Jyono, a kindly Japanese-American whose infant daughter was repeatedly raped by O'Grady, breaks down into a paroxysm of weeping rage is desperately hard to watch, but serves to clarify the unimaginable collateral damage that such events cause.
The director does, however, choose to go beyond the facts of the case to investigate wider contexts. What is the relationship between priest and bishop? What were the origins of clerical celibacy? How did personal ambition affect the decisions of the Californian bishops? Assisted by the admirable Father Tom Doyle, a historian, canon lawyer and supporter of clerical abuse victims, Berg creates something considerably more nuanced and multi-faceted than the scream of raw fury we might have expected.
All that said, Deliver us from Evil is chiefly notable for the deeply disturbing contributions from O'Grady himself. Some commentators have objected to the scenes - now digitally altered to obscure identifying features - in which he is interviewed near unsuspecting children in a Dublin square. And, while it is true that the kids are at no immediate risk, such sequences do, by allowing potential victims into the frame, stray somewhat towards accidental sensationalism.
The suggestions that Berg has been irresponsible in offering O'Grady "a platform" are less sustainable. The manner in which he downgrades his offences to misdemeanours will appall any person not already on the road to dementia. His attempts to view the events as external catastrophes beyond his control will win him no friends either.
One particularly fascinating scene finds a prosecutor asking him whether he has ever been diagnosed with a dissociative disorder. "I've been diagnosed with a lot of things," he says, causing the reasonable spectator to bawl at the screen: "You're doing it now!"
These eerie sequences, without remotely excusing O'Grady's actions, help elucidate just what is going on in such a person's mind. I would like to meet the viewer who felt any warmer towards abusers after watching them. Or, rather, I wouldn't.
