Absolution (1988)

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

This is an astonishing documentary that will wring your heart while it bends your mind

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Father Goddard (Richard Burton) teaches Latin at St. Anthony's boys school. Benjei Stanfield (Dominic Guard) is among his favorite students. However, he has failed to connect with Arthur Dyson in a positive way. Dyson wears a leg brace. He is picked on because he is bothersome. He looks to Father Goddard and Benjei for close friendship, but gets rejected.Meanwhile Blakely, a hippie biker (Billy Connolly) camps out in the woods nearby and has befriend Benjei who sneaks out at night to see him. Blakely's basic life philosophy contradicts the church and he places the idea in Benjei's head of feeding Father Goddard a false confession of a serious nature, one that would cause him to go crazy because he has to keep the secret: "A priest may not break the seal of confession" for any reason. Oh let the head games begin.This is an older film I had not seen before. I loved the twist. Part of a 70's fifty film DVD pact.Guide: No swearing, sex, or nudity.

Richard Burton plays a priest in Absolution. I know, his real-life persona was very un-priest-like, but that's why it's called acting! I mean, Frank Sinatra played a very convincing priest in The Miracle of the Bells, and he was just as un-saintly as Richard Burton in real life. Anyway, Burton gives a great performance as a man of the cloth. He's conflicted and pained, and when he even hears about a sin, you can see him struggling not to take it as a personal insult. He's a teacher and mentor in a boys' Catholic school, and during one of his lessons, the boys ask about the rules during confession. If someone confesses to a crime, will the priest turn him into the police? Burton answers, almost directly into the camera for the audience's benefit, that the priest is bound to silence and can't call the police if he's told of a crime. Then, surprise! One of his students confesses a murder.Granted, if this movie had been made today, it would be a lot more gruesome, and probably have a few more twists and turns. But it was made in 1978, and so if you watch it, keep that in mind. There are a couple of violent scenes, but nothing overly graphic. And I thought it was thrilling, with enough twists and turns to keep me on the edge of my seat. It's a lot of fun to watch a manipulative, snot-nosed student take Burton to the brink of insanity!

This movie is somewhat hard to watch because it is slow-paced and low-budget, but the great acting by Richard Burton and the others make up for this. More importantly, it brings up a unique set of issues that other movies do not, at least not in one single movie. The effects of Father Goddard's favoritism towards apple-polishing Benji at the expense of the more intelligent Dyson. The homoerotic dynamics between Goddard/Benji, Blakey/Benji, Goddard/Dyson, and basically everyone, and the sadism of Benji towards the masochist Dyson (who ultimately is more clever). The biggest issue, more important now than ever, is how crimes can be hidden within the Catholic church which sees itself as above the law and above family/friendship, and well- meaning priests will perpetuate this, because they are inculcated that this is their highest duty. This simple yet extremely intelligent movie shows how the Catholic church can be rendered impotent to protect people because (in theory) its priests are sworn to secrecy, and may not appeal to secular police.

Anthony Shaffer's scripts are nearly always identifiable by the way they stay cleverly one step ahead of the viewer. In his original scripts, such as The Wicker Man and Sleuth, Shaffer skilfully hides shocking and memorable twists right up to the films' conclusion. Also in his adapted scripts – such as Frenzy and Death On The Nile - Shaffer manages to generate lots of mystery and suspense before delivering his trademark surprise-solutions. However, in Absolution, a 1978 film scripted by Shaffer and directed by Anthony Page, the twists are somewhat overdone. Indeed, the film becomes positively excessive in its determination to lead the viewer up various blind alleys, in pursuit of countless red herrings. Slowly but surely credibility is strained, until it collapses altogether at the film's preposterous climax. This is a shame, as the film has an intriguing concept and contains some good performances.At a particularly strict Catholic boarding school, a pupil named Ben Stanfield (Dominic Guard) grows fed up with his reputation as the teacher's pet of priest Father Goddard (Richard Burton). In a moment of outrageous mischief, he speaks to Father Goddard in the confession box and confesses to him that he has murdered a fellow pupil named Arthur Dyson (Dai Bradley). Goddard is understandably distraught to learn of this, more so because he is bound by duty to keep secret all confessions that are made to him. Later Goddard goes to the place where Ben claims to have buried the corpse, but discovers when he digs it up that it is merely a scarecrow and that he has been the victim of a nasty prank. The plot thickens when Ben again tells Father Goddard that he has murdered his fellow student, but this time a real body turns up. The mental strain on Goddard is immense. On one hand, he knows who the killer is, but on the other he can do nothing because his religion says that whatever is passed in confidence in a confession box must remain forever secret. Mad with despair, Goddard takes desperate measures to put a stop to these evil pranks, only to learn too late that all is not what it seems….Burton's performance as the priest is pretty good. One must admit that the film is far-fetched and reaches a delirious, hysterical tone by the end, but throughout Burton manages to give a believable and absorbing performance. The pacing is quite good too, with a deliberately slow build-up that lures the viewer into a false sense of security before the genuinely nasty stuff gets underway. In some ways it seems churlish to criticise Shaffer's script for its twists, because they do at least keep the audience guessing, and few will predict what is coming next. But the thing that makes most of Shaffer's earlier works so effective is that the twists fit in to the overall narrative with eerie plausibility, whereas in this one they seem extremely contrived and over-the-top. I certainly don't agree with some reviewers who suggest that the film is an unmitigated disaster, and the fact that U.S distributors shelved the film for 10 years is very unfair in light of some of the absolute rubbish they release straight away. Absolution is a mid-quality audience teaser, not plausible enough to have any long-lasting resonance but tangled enough to keep its audience guessing.