Ray Pride

Evil is an Irishman.

Evil is a priest, Father Oliver O'Grady, the most notorious pedophile in the Catholic Church. In 1976, O'Grady was reported as an abuser of children in his small Northern California parish. The Church moved him to another jurisdiction, where the sexual predator repeated the behavior, and was moved to another parish, then another, then another... for more than twenty-five years. The now-convicted, defrocked priest, deported to Ireland, but awaiting a retirement bonus from the Church, may have raped hundreds of girls and boys over the period, ranging from a nine-month-old girl to a mother whom he slept with to get close to her children.

Amy Berg's "Deliver Us From Evil" is a stunning documentary about O'Grady and his victims. The now-grown children and their parents are open about the damage caused by O'Grady, and O'Grady himself, with monstrous hubris, allowed himself to be interviewed for several days. The material is shattering, yet "Deliver Us," which does not have a narrator, but a chorus of voices, grows into something larger, for instance, drawing from deposition footage of figures like Cardinal Roger Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles, who, arguably, demonstrates a greater love of power than protecting his parishioners from O'Grady's predations.

On screen, the diminutive O'Grady--"He is a little man. He's tiny! I wanted to show that," Berg tells me--is a phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, fully unable to comprehend the damage he's done for generations to come. When he speaks in his Irish lilt that grows more seductive at dark moments, he bathes himself in self-help locutions. Berg says, eyes wide, "Transference? That did not come from anyone but a therapist, that word."

Berg confesses that several of the interviews of the emotionally scarred parents are set up "like the interviews in `When Harry Met Sally,'" but there are many other telling images, such as a shot of O'Grady in a school, seated at a child's desk, his legs, ankles crossed, jutting from beneath the desk and jittering. "Yeah, yeah. I could have just done the documentary thing and just done the face-on interviews. But then you never would have seen how awkward he is. He comes off very smooth and cool in the interviews, but when you see his hands, he's a real nervous Nellie. He just can't sit still. I think that's the actual reaction to the abuse. He has the physical nervousness that does not match his words. When people ask, `How could he be so remorseless, how can he be so candid?' I think those mannerisms are telling more of the story than anything he says."

Several of the film's subjects travel to Rome, to the Vatican, to seek some sort of counsel. It's explained by a Paula Zahn clip; afterwards, we see Zahn's cameraman shooting what we've seen. "With no narrator, it would have taken a lot more footage and would not have been effective. [The Zahn footage] served its purpose. Showing the behind-the-scenes was important, because the news has come and gone but we're here with them, they're still feeling this pain, it was another headline that came and went. That's kind of the point of this film. We think we know the story because of the headlines, but we really don't. That's why it's not old news. [The victims and their families] are still feeling it today, still fighting today."

Mick Harvey scored the film and there are a couple of judiciously used songs by Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. Berg also employed Danish cameramen. "They're Dogme guys. I love the way the Danish people shoot--there are acid, trip-hoppy videos, and then there are really raw Dogme films..." There are often shots where interview figures are captured in a "wrong" profile that is always effective. "[The Danes] have such respect in their culture. You never know that they're in the room but they're getting the most important moments. It was such a pleasure working with them. They had this respect for the religious imagery even though they're not religious people and I think that came out. I didn't want the film to be church-bashing. I wanted to be, this is the beauty of the church, this is what people love about it, this is why we can be lured in, and then the words were the cold things. The images were the warmth of it."

"Deliver Us From Evil" opens Friday at Landmark Century.

(2006-10-31)

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