Culture Shock Hair

I had to think for a moment to recall Eye of the Needle, which I knocked about in a paragraph when I first conceived of this project, but Sutherland seems to simply roll in and roll out of his parts after this war thriller. I can't think of any film I know of after that where he is not playing Liberal Conscience With Boof Shag; this includes Kienzle's whodunit. It is not that I do not respond to him as an actor; he projects comfort, sometimes balanced compassion, and when he dons the diabolical psychopath, audiences involve their feelings because they see the humane within the menace, but somehow it doesn't quite carry him as a clerical sleuth, not that this doesn't have its own conceits in solving mysteries. Derek Jacobi seems tailor made for his medieval monk. Alec Guinness has Father Brown, which also served him in being George Smiley better than anyone else, but Sutherland doesn't quite carry the dichotomy of the humanist holy man about him, and this is the first problem with the film; it has a subtext that the movie doesn't quite flesh out in the fact that our protagonist is weary with obedience. I am not objecting to this weariness in and of itself, but it drags on the narrative that propels the movie, instead of serving it. Koesler's platonic relationship with the journalist Pat Lennon, which I fully understand is integrated with Kienzle's personal experience of breaking his vows, is a loose strand left to hang, rather than engaging the viewer.

Incest between father and daughter is the primary trigger for the serial killing spree that opens with a nun about to go secular. I am not quite clear how Koesler works out the killer's twisted logic towards the climax, but the killer, Javison, assigns blame for not being stopped, and this is the juxtaposition that interests me about the film. It handles nearly the same problem as Shanley's Doubt, about whether evil is subsumed in the very institution that tries to torture it out of our flesh, if possible, handles it poorly, with all the thud of Medea's deus ex machina; my sensibility is that of implicit seepage.

See the last section on good and evil acts on this Vatican Catechism page:

The issue of moral guilt is doled out like so many eucharist wafers. Of course Javison is a monster, much like my mother's second husband, (and I give credit here to my then parish in Chester for helping me survive Stuart Lone, who I hope is dead, or will die as painfully as he treated my family) but his daughter's school is guilty, for not believing the girl about the abuse. Durning's staunch pastor is guilty, even Koesler has to carry that balance between penitent and pain that simply decelerates into slaughter.

Medical models, creating their own apologia for the mechanisms of psychopathy, do not really resolve the capacity for human anguish, anymore than the silence of bishops, for the sake of preserving the institution. Sound familiar?