Owned release: This is included in the Drive-In Movie Classics 12-disc, 50-movie pack released by Mill Creek in 2008. This is on Disc 4, Side A.
Acquired: Purchased from Amazon on June 3rd, 2009.
Seen before?: No.
This, of course, would be the unnamed film in my Abominable Dr. Phibes review, another example of a long-desired watchlist title that once I had in my grasp I was suddenly in no hurry to get to. Like many a film, this one caught my interest in my teen years when paging through whatever edition of Leonard Maltin's yearly movie bible I had on me at the time. While Phibes may have worked better for me had I seen it back then, I suspect I was correct in sitting on Absolution until I knew a thing or two.
If nothing else, I also hadn't yet seen Sleuth or The Wicker Man or Frenzy as a teenager, which means had I procured and watched a copy of this back then, I wouldn't have understood how this fits into the larger question of the work of writer Anthony Shaffer. Coming to this after those two is the right way to do it, this being a minor but mature work that trades in much of the same stock as those two exemplary antecedents. The common thread in Shaffer's original work reads to me as the dangers of certainty - how an assumed knowledge of What I Know to Be True can blind a person to the true shape of the narrative in which they exist. Richard Burton's rigid Father Goddard, like Andrew Wyke or Sergeant Howie, is a man of imperious authority and strong will who finds himself caught up in intellectual gamesmanship with an opponent he ruinously underestimates, in no small part due to his need to filter the world through the lens of his religion and the vows to it that he has devoted his life towards. The structure of his life and work have been as they were for so long that he cannot conceive, for instance, his pet student Stanfield chafing under the restrictions of parochial school and pranking him via the sacrament of confession. The fallout from this prank proves darker than either man could have anticipated, as both proceed from an understanding of how Father Goddard can and will act.
What's clever about this film is how Shaffer's screenplay and Anthony Page's direction work together to quietly lock the audience inside Father Goddard's perspective as well. This is true in terms of the story structure, relying as it does on certain elisions of action that are necessary for us to make the same assumptions that Father Goddard makes. But there's some formal quirks that accomplish this as well, ranging from the obvious to the subtle. In the former camp, you have a crucial tracking shot of Stanfield running through the woods after an argument with Blakey, a drifter he's befriended (played in his film debut by the great Billy Connolly); the shot, keeping up with Stanfield in full sprint and overlaid with shrieking Hermann-esque violins, represents an overflow of panic and guilt, an eruption of action in what has to that point been a staid affair, and there are two subsequent shots that mirror it at different turns of the plot in blunt visual representations of the transfer or shift of that panic and guilt. Also fairly obvious, especially in light of this being from the guy who wrote The Wicker Man, is the import of Blakey living in the woods - of course this rootless dude, with his old letterman jacket and long hair and long beard and easy grin, whose first introduction to the boys of this school is hollering, "All property is theft!" at them and whose espousal of the hedonistic lifestyle becomes increasingly appealing to the young Stanfield, would be a nature boy and thus diametrically aligned against the stern Catholicism of Father Goddard in favor of a do-what-thou-wilt paganism. Blakey even reveals that he once served as a carnival fortune teller, making whatever codswallop jumped into his head and selling it to the gullible. "As long as they left smilin', I didn't care what crap I told 'em," he chuckles into his whiskey, and of course. Father of lies, right?
That we're expecting this push-pull battle for Stanfield is certainly encouraged by the script - the first exchange of dialogue is between Blakey and Goddard, with the latter refusing the former's request for employment - so it's only in retrospect that it sinks in that Blakey never actually does anything sinister. Through the narrative, he's nothing more than a friendly, shaggy hippie whose worst crime is stealing some food from the school kitchen and being a rootless sort of fella who befriends a young man itching for an excuse to rebel. That's what I'm talking about when I mention subtler indications that we're spending the whole film more or less in Father Goddard's headspace. This is apparent when parts of the narrative that he would have no access to and know nothing about still bear the echo of his judgment. A notable example is the scene where Blakey is harassed by two cops - as he's being pummeled by two cops, there's a cut to a closeup of his head smacking into the ground, then as one of the cops grasps his head and begins to pull him up by his hair, Page cuts to Goddard's classroom where a student is reading the line, "An enemy has done this." This is true in the moment from Blakey's perspective, but if we assume Goddard's perspective it's a sneaky callback to an early scene where the students are performing Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience and we hear the line, "The enemy of one, the enemy of all is!" Blakey is, to Goddard, an enemy against all he is and represents, and is thus an enemy to all his charges, and his influence over his prize pupil Stanfield is an offense he cannot bear.
His attempts to solve the problem while still holding fast to the restrictions necessitated by his role within the Church (most importantly the impossibility of breaking the seal of confession) only cause more problems, and as things spiral out of control, the warm earthen browns and greens of the forest shift to dark and threatening shades of autumnal decay, with multiple bodies found buried in earth black as Goddard's cassock, and the shadows in the school grow deeper until they threaten to swallow every hall and every classroom. (The climactic confrontation is cast in so little light that it might as well be happening in space.) The back half of Absolution invites the sort of crazed ultraham that Burton became known for late in his career, but he instead keeps a firm hand, leaking out just enough hysteria in his choked, whispered prayers and widened eyes that the effect is as though he were bellowing anyway. The closer Goddard gets to what he sees as The Truth, the further he gets from seeing the end reveal coming and the closer he gets to derangement. The key shot, from where I stand, comes in a scene where Goddard is confronting Stanfield about having lied in confession. The two men are at opposite sides of the frame in the foreground and a large ornamental spear in the background hangs on the wall. The arrangement of the actors is such that the spear appears to emanate from Stanfield's eyes and bury its point in Goddard's skull. It's a loaded image, but it's also something of a dodge: Goddard lets Stanfield get inside his head, leading to ruin for all... but not in the way we are led to believe. At the end of The Wicker Man, Sergeant Howie pays for his headstrong obliviousness with his life. At the end of Absolution, Father Goddard is left to a worse fate.
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