Mark Reviews Movies: CORPUS CHRISTI

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 13, 2020

"We do the best that we can," says the young man. "Or we don't," the young woman responds. Morality is that simple, perhaps, but the challenge is that we are human—that we can choose not to do our best. We make mistakes, either accidentally or intentionally. We hold grudges, because sometimes pain seems to be all that we have in this life. We lie in ways both big and small.

For an example of the last one, the young man at the center of Corpus Christi, who recently has been released from a juvenile detention facility, offers his consolatory advice as a Catholic priest. He is not a priest, though. Indeed, he likely could never become one. No seminary would ever accept Daniel (Bartosz Bielenia), on account of his criminal record.

Despite this, he wants to become a priest. While in that facility, serving his time for the crime of which he refuses to speak for so long, Daniel has undergone a transformation.

He doesn't just attend Mass in the facility. He participates, preparing the service for Fr. Tomasz (Lukasz Simlat), the in-house priest, and leading the singing of hymns for his fellow prisoners.

Those are the easy things, though. In the facility, Daniel has become a target. The opening scene has other prisoners grabbing him when the woodshop is momentarily unattended. They open a drawer, pulls down his pants, and proceed to close the drawer with his most sensitive parts inside of it. Daniel struggles, but he doesn't fight back. Maybe that's just a matter of numbers, but maybe it's because the young man doesn't want a fight anymore. He has experienced that, as we learn when he confesses the crime that landed him in juvie, and this is what he received for those actions.

The film, written by Mateusz Pacewicz and directed by Jan Komasa, puts forth a variety of questions about faith, forgiveness, and fraud. The central one, though, seems to be pretty straightforward: Is the measure of a person the sum of what he or she has done, or is it what they actually do in the here and now?

For Daniel, society sees him as the sum of his mistakes—especially the one that landed him in a detention facility. He is released near the start of the story—just in the nick of time, considering that a man who has it out for him just arrived to serve his own time. Before being sent out into the world, Daniel tries to confront Bonus (Mateusz Czwartosz), the man who wants him dead. It's not a violent or aggressive confrontation—at least not on Daniel's end. There's pure humility in it. As for Bonus' reaction, it's a very good thing for Daniel that he's leaving this place.

Daniel's destination is a lumber mill on the other side of Poland, where he will work, likely for the rest of his life (however long that may be, since he has a mortal enemy who will be released one day, too), and forgo his dream of becoming a priest. He spends one last night partying in Warsaw, with alcohol and drugs and sex, and on the bus to the mill, a local cop can sense that Daniel is an ex-convict and calls him scum. This is his future.

He visits the local church. He lies to Eliza (Eliza Rycembel), the daughter of the woman who tends house for the pastor, that he is a priest. It's mostly a joke, but Eliza and her mother Lidia (Aleksandra Konieczna) take him seriously. Lidia wants him to put on his black outfit with the white collar to meet the pastor (played by Zdzislaw Wardejn), and since he stole such an outfit from Fr. Tomasz, Daniel does—after trying to escape through a window, realizing that he's about to get in over his head quickly.

In a short amount of time, Daniel becomes the church's interim priest. He is a hit with loyal parishioners and those who haven't been to church in some time. He's good at it, because he talks to people on their level and with a genuine sense of thoughtful compassion. It's a lie, obviously, but when Daniel is actually changing people's hearts and minds toward doing the best that they can, is it really a lie? Can a lie reveal truth and goodness?

Like its protagonist, this is a thoughtful and compassionate film. It's not primarily about the complications of Daniel's character and fraud (although they certainly arise, with the suspicious mayor, played Leszek Lichota, thinking Daniel is overreaching and a familiar face from juvie making an appearance at the lumber mill), but about how Daniel, who is superficially the most unlikely person to talk to anybody about being a good person, is exactly the kind of person this village needs.

There was a car accident about a year ago, in which eight people—seven young people and the sole driver of the other car—were killed. The townspeople have yet to recover, and they blame the man in the other car, extending their hatred toward his widow (played by Barbara Kurzaj). The main thread of the story is how Daniel tries to learn the truth of what happened that night and, however events may have happened, to teach the mourning that, while their anger—toward a dead man and a woman who had nothing to do with the incident—may be a valid emotional reaction, their capacity to forgive will be the thing that sets them free.

Pacewicz and Komasa address these moral complications and contradictions with intelligence, humor, and an intimate sense of these characters. That last one is especially true of Daniel, played by Bielenia with outward charm and inner turmoil. The man was and, because of his lie, remains a sinner, but it's that knowledge of pain, regret, being judged, and trying to become a better person that makes him an empathetic spiritual advisor—if a fake priest.

Does the lie matter more than the truth that lie reveals? Corpus Christi seems set on accepting the truth over the lie, but the filmmakers are too smart to dismiss human nature entirely. The finale here subverts the idea of sacrifice in a way that is both hopeful and tragically human. We do our best, and—not or—we don't.

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