Screen
Alleva, Richard
A PORTRAIT OF EVIL 'THE BOYS OF SAINT VINCENT' In one of his poems, Bertolt Brecht looks at a Japanese carved mask representing the visage of an evil demon. Sympathetically I observe The...
...It is a furious face which constantly threatens to disintegrate before our eyes...
...Sympathetically I observe The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating What a strain it is to be evil...
...please, 19 SCREEN Brother, I want to get some sleep...
...Then he rears back up and pounds twice more...
...The relieved city council— "We can't be seen giving a million dollars to a bunch of perverts"—can now close the hockey rink deal...
...By contrast, Steve seems eager to testify for the sake of vengeance...
...The first half of Saint Vincent is virtually a horror movie with Lavin as the vampire lord of the castle...
...But Lavin isn't arrested, publicly denounced, or even punished...
...But it is director Smith's genius to show how enormity can coexist with normality and how normality cloaks enormity...
...In fact, helping his wife in the kitchen, he seems surprisingly relaxed, happy, superficially decent...
...Slams away his budding recognition of his fallen nature and the unexpungeable harm it has done to others...
...A district attorney, determined to bring the long-suppressed crimes to light, subpoenas Kevin and several of the former wards, including Steve, who in part 1 was a tough, likable little con artist and who is now a drug-hustling, drug-taking wreck...
...But even the one who survives comes perilously close to catastrophe...
...It is a twisted face, most often twisted in scorn but sometimes in self-pity...
...An elderly brother lends a promisingly intelligent boy named Kevin books and quizzes him as to how he likes them...
...The structure reflects its creator...
...Well, not if we take it as journalism...
...The strain of evil is stamped on the face of Brother Peter Lavin, the fearsome yet pathetic orphanage superintendent in The Boys of Saint Vincent, JohnN...
...To say this is not to grant the movie a license to be one-sided or otherwise unfair but to indicate what sort of truth it is trying to tell...
...And why are the halls and dormitories at night so crepitant not just with the normal nocturnal sounds that all large houses make but with sighs, moans, whimpering, and—worst of all—sibilant, insinuating whispers...
...Chantal is devastated...
...Then he jumps to his feet and slams the table in front of him several times...
...If there has ever been a harsher leavetaking of a character in a play or film than this one, I haven't seen it...
...The very first shot under the credits is classically spooky: the Newfoundland orphanage and the adjoining church are viewed at twilight...
...But look closely at Lavin's face as the camera closes in on it and you can see that the man fully comprehends his own abomination, but his outer layer of consciousness, which manifests itself as self-righteous fury, keeps him rolling along and trampling right over others...
...They clearly love Lavin and they are seeing their loved one beginning to be destroyed...
...Acts of compassion are regarded as sabotage and, when another brother's mealtime grace turns into an appeal for God's mercy, Lavin takes the prayer as a personal affront...
...They collect old clothes from the townspeople for school fund-raising...
...In the shattering denouement, Lavin, finding himself completely alone, starts to crumble, his eyes fill with tears, his mouth twitches...
...For one thing, the strain of evil is no longeron Lavin !s face...
...But even if we think that a (possibly) reformed Lavin should still be punished, there is something else to consider: standing beside him as he is arrested are Lavin's wife, Chantal (played to heartbreaking perfection by Lise Roy), and his children...
...He subsides for a moment...
...The decency and diligence of three men—a janitor, a police detective, and that aforementioned book-lending brother—end the horror and force the obfuscating church bureaucracy to terminate Lavin's reign...
...But is this film journalism...
...Smith's searing Canadian film about the consequences of pedophilia...
...The Christmas celebrations are a grand success...
...Their contrasting performances on the witness stand give us a double answer: the revelation of past evil can either destroy or redeem...
...By contrast, Czerny makes Lavin a man so encased in the armor of self-righteousness that even the embers of his humanity have been stamped out...
...Once we get inside the orphanage, everything seems plausible...for a while...
...And Lavin, of course, is right...
...The boys recite their catechism and their lessons...
...But, with his body and mind discombobulated by drugs, is he really ready to testify...
...It is fifteen years later...
...Why is he summoned so often and so late in the day to Brother Lavin's office, and why is he so reluctant to go...
...It doesn't adduce dozens of wellrun, wholesome Catholic orphanages to counter the portrait of hell that is Saint Vincent...
...Lavin's angry countenance and rigid body, after all, might pass as the bearing of an ultra-competent man baffled by incompetence or laxity...
...Independence, kindness, and genuine piety are threats to Lavin's rule, for he has used his authority to create an institution that is quite plausible in its everyday functioning (the kids are taught and fed and clothed adequately) and utterly rotten at its core...
...Thus, on a terrifying note of plus ca change, closes part 1, which could pass as a self-contained little masterpiece of horror if part 2 did not exists For it is with part 2 that John Smith and his scriptwriters (Des Walsh and Sam Grana) ask really tough questions, dare to provoke and even exasperate us, and bring us face to face not with the easily detectable villainy of part 1, but with that infuriating but all-too-human trait that Baudelaire defined when he said, "I see the best but I do the worst...
...He and two other pedophiles on the staff are packed off for "treatment" and into obscurity...
...Is it mainly a muckraking expose...
...Time has wrought great changes in all concerned and these changes bring us up short, complicate our feelings, and deny us any pat conclusions...
...I don't think so...
...Its truth is not a matter of stating a social problem fairly, of setting up equal members of good priests against bad priests, of citing statistics which comfort against statistics which blast...
...And it's not just the matter of public disgrace...
...When Lavin slams the goodness out of his heart just before the final credits roll, we find ourselves confronting a spiritual deformity that no reformation of church policy can mitigate, against which no legislation can prevail...
...Actor Henry Czerny' s looks are faintly similar to Sam Neill' s, but even when Neill plays a sexually repressed man in The Piano, his glamour shines through the character's neuroses...
...And, at night, the whispering continues while a boy' s voice softly petitions, "Please...
...In part 2, he lies to his wife and his lawyer and his psychiatrist (Lavin's brilliant and bloodchilling conning of the last will not give any comfort to the male sensitivity movement), but most of all he lies to himself...
...The family is destroyed but out of its wreckage Chantal may make a better life for herself and her children because now at last she sees clearly what Lavin is and what she must do to put him behind her...
...But Lavin himself can go nowhere spiritually because he has continued lying...
...How could anything be wrong at Saint Vincent...
...Lavin, no longer a brother but still a church-going, rosary-fingering Catholic and a married man with two children, is arrested...
...True, there is that one elderly brother who helps rescue Kevin in part 1, but it's likely that some members of the audience will come away from this picture with an impression not much different from that of the dizzbrain who, in one of the movie's more satirical sequences, phones a radio talk show to contribute the usual "you get these priests with their vows of celibacy alone in a house with a bunch of boys and ya just know...
...We may well wonder if we're about to see a less supernatural offspring of The Exorcist...
...It is a work of dramatic poetry...
...The End...
...The Boys of Saint Vincent is a portrait of irreducible evil, the finest that has appeared on screen since the Dutch film, The Vanishing...
...Worse: Kevin, Lavin's main victim, is to be the star witness and the obligation to examine his memories tortures him...
...Must Lavin's family be destroyed so that he can be punished...
...A new superintendent takes charge...
...A child's faint effort to escape Brother Lavin's lascivious embraces is treated by the superintendent as an act of delinquency, almost impiety...
...But why does Kevin wash his body with such spasmodic vigor in the shower room...
...The kids are bewildered...
...Is The Boys of Saint Vincent fair to the Catholic church...
...a boys' choir sings the praises of the Lord while dry tree branches whisper and click in the wind...
...the cross that tops the church spire reaches up into a wintry blue sky...
...The Boys of Saint Vincent will be shown nationally on Arts and Entertainment Cable in the fall...
...Will the trial purge these youths of horror or drown them in it...
...And when one lad sasses a teacher, he's not severely punished...
...Slams himself back into the spiritual armor of self-righteousness and despisal of others, slams himself back into the solitary confinement that is his life...
...There is a normal amount of horseplay and it's treated indulgently enough by the brothers...
...RICHARD ALLEVA 20...
...At this point, we may ask ourselves if time itself doesn't put criminals beyond the reach of the law by rendering their former evil unrecognizable to themselves...
...Christmas preparations are underway, as well as some big plans to coax money out of a city council to build an ice hockey rink to be affiliated with the school...
...And Lavin and his family...
...In part 1, he lied to the authorities to conceal his crime...
Vol. 121 • July 1994 • No. 13
