Why Groundhog Day is the Best Movie of All Time…

…at least, in my opinion.

(Note: This is not a review. I’m going to assume you’ve seen the movie. If you haven’t... well, get on it straight way, unlesss you are currently cramming for your Bar exams, or in rehab, or something like that.)

Some people complain that the whole exercise of naming a greatest film, poem, song or President of America is ridiculous, since comparisons are odious, and apples are different from oranges, and it’s all rather subjective anway. Of course, all those things are true. Nevertheless, the human race will cheerfully go on nominating all-time greatests, compiling top ten lists, and arguing for hours in pubs, dormitories and school yards about the best Beatles album or James Bond. It’s one of the things I love about this wacky species of ours.

So why Groundhog Day?

Because I think Groundhog Day, more so than any other film, captures the wonder and joy of life-- and captures what Patrick Kavanagh called life’s “ordinary plenty”. Citizen Kane is a great film, and Casablanca is a great film, and The Lord of the Rings is a great film, and The Godfather is a great film. But it seems to me that the themes of those films are rather removed from the reality of most ordinary peoples’ lives. Strangely enough, I think a film about a man caught in an unexplained time loop reflects more of universal human experience than any of those classics.

While I’m not a Quentin Tarantino type who boasts an encyclopaedic knowledge of almost every movie ever made—- and I have no desire to be-— I’m pretty keen on the cinema and movies. My anoraky “Movies Seen” spreadsheet (which I thoroughly enjoyed compiling, and keep regularly updated) lists 419 films seen in the cinema alone. When I include the films I’ve seen outside the cinema, it’s close to a thousand—- and I only counted the films of which I have some clear memory.

And of all those, Groundhog Day is the clear winner. Nothing else even comes close.

I love pretty much everything about this movie. I love the premise. I love the setting. I love the climate. I love the shop fronts and shop signs. I love the music. I love the overcoats and scarves. I love the décor in the fictional Tip Top Café and Pennyslvania Hotel. I love the back and forth of the radio presenters who wake Phil up every morning. I love the beanie hat that the rather dorky camera-man Larry wears. I love the song ‘The Pennsylvania Polka’. And, of course, I love Ned Ryerson.

I wish life was like Groundhog Day. It’s the kind of world I would like to live in-— and it’s similar enough to the actual world to throw its spell over our reality. The best films, just like the best poems and the best paintings, make us see the real world through more appreciative and wondering eyes, by drawing out one aspect of life and making that aspect sufficiently picturesque and vivid.

Of course, that brings us close to the very theme of the film-— the theme of gratitude and wonder. The very first line, spoken by the (intitially) narcissistic and cynical central character, is “Somebody asked me today, Phil, if you could be anywhere in the world, where would you want to be?”. By the end of the film, Phil learns how to answer that question, “Right here”— even though he is stuck in a small town for which he initially had only a city slicker’s contempt.

In one of his earliest, unpublished poems, G.K. Chesterton wrote: “Here dies another day...and with tomorrow begins another. Why am I allowed two?”. That is pretty much the message of Groundhog Day: that if we could really appreciate one day, like the single day in which Phil is trapped, our minds would be boggled at the insane bounty that God has lavished upon us in giving us so many more days than just one.

Having said that, if I was to be trapped in a single day—- and even that thought is a rather cosy one to me-- I think I would choose a snowy day in a small town like the movie’s Punxsatawney.

One of the reasons Groundhog Day might appeal to religious believers is that it has, in its far-from-heavy way, a somewhat spiritual theme to it. The director Harold Ramis said that various different religious groups “adopted” the film when it first came out, claiming it had a Buddhist or Jewish or Christian message. He himself believed the movie’s theme was more universal, and I agree. There isn’t really anything specifically Christian, still less specifically Catholic, about Groundhog Day.

But I think the movie is pretty Christian-friendly, in many ways. First off, it has a pretty high moral tone. Even the unreformed Phil isn’t the worst kind of jerk; he at least pretends to be fishing in his pockets when he walks past a beggar, he socialises with two small town ne’er-do-wells (and volunteers to drive them when he sees how drunk they are), and his barbs are rather good-humoured even at their worst. When he finally clicks with Rita, their canoodling seems quite chaste.

At one point, before his reform, Phil casually assumes the existence of God when he tells Rita: “Well, maybe the real God uses tricks. Maybe he’s not omnipotent, he’s just been around so long he knows everything.” In another scene, he says a short prayer-— and even though he’s only doing it to impress Rita, I like the fact that he thought of it in the first place.

This matter-of-fact acceptance of God’s existence is one of the subtle, background elements of Groundhog Day that I love so much. The whole social and cultural world that the movie evokes is a stable, rather gentle one. It was released in 1993 but it has the atmosphere of an eighties movie; like Planes, Trains and Automobiles or Trading Places. Somehow, in those sort of eighties movies, the more or less stock characters, familiar sources of humour, and focus on everyday life give the impression of a dependable, fairly traditional, slowly-changing world. I don’t think there are any cell phones or computers to be seen in this film. Nor are there any gangsta rappers or metrosexuals.

The movie is a comedy, of course, but it’s not rib-tickingly funny—- and this is actually one of the things I like about it. Laugh-a-minute movies are rarely movies that we want to revisit; and the frenetic pace of the gags doesn’t leave much room for character, atmosphere or theme to develop. I like how the comic exchanges in Groundhog Day are not protracted. At one point, Phil makes fun of a sweater Larry is wearing by saying: “Looking foxy tonight, man! Tell me, is your troupe going to be selling cookies this year?”. Larry’s reponse-- “Ha, ha, ha, that’s so funny Phil!”—is a pretty lame rejoinder that wouldn’t pass muster in a sitcom. But it’s just right for the slow-burning pace of this movie.

There is barely a wrong note in the entire film. The jokes are funny enough for their purpose. The scenes never drag on too long. And, most importantly, the flights of sentimentality are pitch-perfect. There is a rather gormless notion about that sentimentality per se is a flaw. But sentimentality, just like slapstick or shock value or pathos, is only bad when it’s done badly. Admittedly, it’s easier to get wrong, and it does make us cringe when it’s cloying. So I think it’s one of the triumphs of this movie that it features defty-written sentimental dialogue, like these words that Phil speaks to Rita, when she asks him what he knows about her:

“You like boats, but not the ocean. You go to a lake in the summer with your family up in the mountains. There's a long wooden dock and a boathouse with boards missing from the roof, and a place you used to crawl underneath to be alone. You're a sucker for French poetry and rhinestones. You're very generous. You're kind to strangers and children, and when you stand in the snow you look like an angel.”

Perfectly judged. (Even the rhythm of the sentences is masterful.) Ditto this speech Phil makes later on, which is the best moment in the entire film:

“When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.”

Am I really making a case for Groundhog Day being the best movie ever? Maybe not. It seems to me that anyone who loves it already will know its most obvious excellences, and all I can do is point out some other little things I love about it:

I love that it features a romance between a middle-aged man and a woman who is not that much younger—and that this is almost incidental.

I love that poetry features quite prominently in the movie. Phil, even before his reformation, claims that he loves poetry. Poems by Sir Walter Scott and Joyce Kilmer are quoted. A world without poetry is an uncivilized world, and it only takes a little poetry to raise life (or a film) to a higher plateau.

I love that, during the climactic party scene, two elderly ladies are dancing with each other and nobody cares or even remarks on it.

I love that, in the first scene, Phil’s fellow news anchor mentions a report on “sex and violence in the movies”. I miss the times when sex and violence in the movies was a standard moral panic.

I love the jowly, well-groomed, jovial fellow who greets Phil in the bed-and-breakfast—the one that Phil calls “Pork Chops”.

I love that, when Phil steps in an icy puddle, Ned Ryerson says: “Watch out for that first step, it’s a doozy.” I like the idea of being so familiar with your home town that you know where the puddles are. (I always think of this when I step past a particular loose paving stone in the university where I work.)

I love that Phil says, “I think people place too much importance on their careers. I think we should all go live on the mountains, at high altitude.” Even if he is just trying to ingratiate himself with Rita, it’s a nice sentiment. I like the idea of a society where sentiments like that are aired and not considered bizarre.

I love the moment when Phil, waiting his moment to swipe a bag of money from a security truck, says: “A gust of wind...a dog barks...cue the truck.” There is something very timeless and peaceful about that moment; the kind of complete absorption in the now that you get while sketching.

I love the black bartender who shakes his head whimsically at Phil’s chat-up lines. I like to think that the bartender is, somehow, the only person other than Phil who knows what’s going on.

I love Larry mentioning that he has covered “the swallows returning to Capistrano six years in a row.”

I love the subdued atmosphere and music in the almost-deserted bowling alley in which Phil, Ralph and Gus sit at the bar and sip their drinks.

I love…well, maybe that’s enough. I just love everything about this movie, and I hope that its magic never wears off for me. And, furthermore, I hope that this post might be found and enjoyed by some other Groundhog Day fanatics out there!

God at the Movies

I am a confirmed cinema addict. If I haven't walked into that darkened auditorium in more than a few weeks-- and is there any thrill to match that crossing of the threshold, except the moment when the title appears on screen?-- then I feel an ungovernable urge to go and see some film, any film.

I guess Batman was the natural choice. I had actually paid to see the first film, Batman Begins, five times during its theatrical run. (It’s not the only time I’ve seen a film in the cinema five times.) But my grá for the Batman franchise, and my irritation at the hype surrounding it, was already fading by the time The Dark Knight came out. I did go to see it but left after about twenty minutes, deciding that it was—to be blunt—a sick film. But I was persuaded, by the gushing enthusiasm of acquaintances, to try it again when it came out on DVD. Again, I thought it was a sick film, and not even a particularly good one.

Long before The Dark Knight Rises came out, I had resolved not to patronise any more superhero films. What does it say about the infantilisation of our popular culture that, at the time of writing, there are three big superhero movies dominating the multiplexes-- Batman, Spiderman, and the Avengers?

I’ve heard all the apologetics for the genre; that superheroes are the mythology of our era, that infinite variations can be played upon the theme, that the latest caped or masked sensation is a superhero with a difference, or the Citizen Kane of superhero movies, or like no superhero we’ve ever seen.

I’m not buying it. When it comes down to it, they are all films about more or less tortured souls, torn between duty and love, cavorting around in brightly-coloured skin-tight costumes, and finding themselves pitted against villains who—surprise, surprise!—are also dressed flamboyantly and sport bizarre names. That these films take themselves more and more seriously all the time just makes the whole set-up more ridiculous.

So, shunning the caped crusader, I decided to pay in to see Prometheus a second time, even though I hadn’t thought it an especially good film the first time I saw it. But it certainly looks amazing, and that goes a long way.

Prometheus also takes itself very, very seriously. It asks Big Questions about the origin and purpose of life, and the characters even advert to the Bigness of the Questions they are asking. The film also explores (or tries to explore) religious themes. The fact that it does so at all deserves some credit. Unfortunately, they are handled pretty cack-handedly.

The plot is an old one. (Spoilers ahead!) A husband-and-wife team of archaeologists discover that cave paintings from many different cultures seem to be beckoning mankind to a distant planet. The de rigeur Sinister Corporation bankrolls a spaceship journey to the faraway star (this is in the later decades of this century). The expedition discovers, with a remarkable speed and ease, that humanity has in fact been genetically engineered by an alien species.

The female protagonist wears a cross and believes in God. She never really describes her beliefs and Christ is never mentioned (except in the obligatory swearing), but it seems likely she is a Christian of some sort.

Her husband-—a loving and devoted husband, we are given to understand-—comments, when they have made their great discovery, “guess you can take off your father’s cross now” and insists that, as they have now learned, “There’s nothing special about the creation of life. All you need is a dash of DNA and half a brain.”

His wife makes the obvious rejoinder—-where did this alien civilization themselves come from? But of course, even that explanation wouldn’t really explain anything, since we are still left with a universe that is primed to produce life, and—-even more fundamentally-—the bare fact of the universe itself. I have never understood why people like Richard Dawkins believe that Darwinism delivered a knock-out punch to “the God hypothesis”—and why so many Christians seem to go along with their strange logic, desperately trying to punch holes in the theory (holes which might be there for all I know).

But that wasn’t the only thing I found weird about the scene. Would a loving husband really behave so brutally if (as he believed) his wife’s deepest beliefs and hopes were shattered? The character is presented as being rather jaunty and matter-of-fact, even tactless. But he is also portrayed as an adoring husband.

This phenomenon seems to me all too typical of movies, TV shows and novels—-the notion that religious beliefs (or the lack thereof) is something that shouldn’t and doesn’t matter when it comes to marriage or mating. The fact that one of the lovers believes that she has an immortal soul and that life is intrinsically meaningful, while the other believes that every human being is a machine made of meat and that all the things human beings care most about are ultimately illusory, is seen to be irrelevant to True Love.

But Holloway, the husband character, is a rather implausible character anyway. We are given to understand that he is motivated by an insatiable desire to discover—-but this only takes the form (since he believes mankind were created by aliens) of seeking to learn more about our makers, principally the reason that they made us in the first place. Other than that, he is shown to be rather lacking in scientific, intellectual or philosophical curiosity.

On second thoughts, perhaps this combination-—obsessive interest in some empirical question, combined with a deeper intellectual apathy-—is quite realistic. I can think of many celebrated figures that evince it. But it is no less puzzling for that.

But the most questionable portrayal of religious belief comes at the very beginning of the film, when the central character (as a young girl) is seen asking her father what happens when we die. Her father (possibly a Unitarian) tells her that we go to a place for which everybody has different names, but which is undoubtedly beautiful. And when the girl asks (as children are wont to ask) how he knows this, the father’s only response is: “It’s what I choose to believe.”

Isn’t a film delving into deep questions obliged to go a little deeper than that? Yes, there are probably parents who would make such a terse reply if their children asked them for a justification of their religious beliefs, and there are (unfortunately) adults who would do the same in an adult discussion.

Of course there is an element of “choosing to believe” in religious faith. There is an element of choice in many of our beliefs, but especially when it comes to religious belief. God does not coerce the intellect, and the act of faith involves not only dispassionate calculation but also emotional responses and even (I would argue) virtues-—for instance, gratitude, wonder and trust.

But there is a lot more to faith than simply choosing to believe, and if the movie-makers aspired to a serious examination of religious faith, surely they would have given us a character that would at least make a serious case for it.

I did not think the movie was anti-religion. The cross-wearing believer is, after all, the heroine, and at the end of the movie her faith is seen to be intact and (arguably) vindicated. I am grateful to see religious faith even given the time of day in a major movie, but ultimately, Prometheus had nothing deep or significant to say about the big questions it raises. In that, it is all too typical of religion on the big screen.

Review of The Rocky Road to Dublin

Film review-- The Rocky Road to Dublin (documentary by Peter Lennon, 1967)

The camera never lies. This truth is borne out by Peter Lennon's storied documentary, The Rocky Road to Dublin, which sets out to be an indictment of late-sixties Ireland, but now seems like a monument to a more innocent and cultured era.

The question Lennon poses at the beginning of the film-- "What do you do with your revolution once you've got it?"-- has now taken on an extra, ironic layer of meaning. Of course, Lennon was referring to the Irish Revolution that began in 1916 and ended in Irish independence in the twenties, or perhaps even in the declaration of an Irish Republic in 1948.

But since The Rocky Road to Dublin was made, there has been a second revolution in Ireland-- a social and cultural revolution-- and it is this revolution that is essentially being urged in every frame of the documentary. So of course the question now applies to that revolution, too. What has it achieved? Is Irish society today an obvious improvement on the Irish society recorded in Lennon's documentary?

Every viewer must answer that question himself, or herself. But for me the answer is an emphatic "no".

Lennon printed the film in black and white, even though it was shot in colour, because he felt it "was more in keeping with the tone of the film", according to Wikipedia. This is consistent with Lennon's whole approach, which is (it must be said) rather manipulative and selective throughout-- although it must also be conceded that he lets his subjects speak for themselves, and these interviews are the most revealing and interesting part of the documentary.

Lennon, who was at the time a journalist for the Guardian (no surprise there), sets out to portray the Irish society of his time as grey, conformist, anti-intellectual, and in thrall to a dictatorial Catholic Church.

The film begins with a heavily-bespectacled boy standing up in a classroom and reciting: "Because of Adam's sin we are born without orig-- we are born without santifying grace, our intellect is darkened, our will is weakened and our passions incline us to evil, and we suffering-- we are subject to suffering and death."

The documentary is setting out its stall straight away. These poor kids being forced to trot out all this nonsense about mythical figures and mumbo-jumbo! But anyone who had a Catholic education in the eighties or nineties will feel a certain envy, I think. My religious education in school, to a great extent, consisted of pop psychology, and of watching "inspiring" feature films in religion class. When I did receive solid catechesis, mostly from an adorable old nun who treated us to Rollo chocolates, I found it fascinating. How is knowledge ever a bad thing? Even for a non-believer, isn't it good to know something about the teaching of the Church, if only for its historical and cultural importance? And it is obvious that catechesis doesn't take away from the rest of education, for all Ruadhri Quinn's claims, since Catholic schools have always tended to outperform non-denominational schools.

The film moves on to its credit sequence, over the titular song, "The Rocky Road to Dublin" by the Dubliners. (The Dubliners, in fact, supply the whole soundtrack.) The camera tracks through scenes of a beach, a country road, two priests on bicycles, and the skyline of Dublin. Everything looks cleaner and prettier than it does now-- no traffic-clogged roads, no fast food joints, no jeans or tracksuits, and next to no litter anywhere.

Peter Lennon narrates: "This is a personal attempt to reconstruct for the camera the plight of an island community which survived more than seven hundred years of English occupation, and then nearly sank under the weight of its own heroes and clergy. More than half a century ago at Easter 1916, the Irish made yet another attempt in a centuries-long history of insurrection to break free of England. A rebellion led by poets and socialists, it was one of the first attemps by a small nation to throw off a colonial power by force. It was also the ambition of these idealists to awaken a lethargic and indifferent Irish population to an ideal of freedom."

This, it has to be said, is the version of Irish history that has been established in the popular mind. But how true is it? It is, of course, true to say that the 1916 Rising was led by "poets and socialists", insofar as the Marxist James Connolly was one of its leading lights, and his Citizen's Army fought alongside the Irish Volunteers. But they were a minority, and it seems fair to say that most of those who fought in 1916-- like Patrick Pearse, his brother Willie, Joseph Plunkett, Con Colbert and Eamonn De Valera-- were committed Catholics. In fact, even James Connolly received the last rites prior to his execution, when such an act could have had no propaganda benefit for him.

It has often been said that the majority of those who fought in 1916 were educated by the Christian Brothers, whose ideals of faith and nation-- "for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland", as their motto ran-- motivated the insurrectionists. In fact, Kevin O'Higgins, who was a member of the first Dáil and a leading figure in the Irish Revolution, famously said: "we were the most conservative-minded revolutionaries who ever put through a successful revolution."

Of course, this itself is a slight distortion, since there were undoubtedly radical elements involved in the struggle for independence, but it seems truer than the history propounded by Peter Lennon in this documentary-- and by Ken Loach in his artistically excellent but historically misleading film, The Wind that Shakes the Barley.

The first interviewee is Sean O'Faolain, the short story writer whose radical journal, The Bell, anticipated the second Irish revolution-- that is, the social revolution. Funnily enough, even he appears in the documentary as a rather quaint, genteel and archaic figure, sitting in a garden smoking a pipe, wearing a grey suit and a sober tie. "The kind of society that actually grew up", he says, "is a society of what I call urbanised peasants-- a society which was without moral courage, which was constantly observing a self-interested silence, never speaking in moments of crisis, and in constant alliance with a completely obscurantist, regressive, repressive and uncultivated Church." (No mincing of words there). "A society of blatant inequalities and in which the whole spirit of '16 has been lost."

O'Faolain, along with other critics of post-revolutionary Ireland, cites republicanism as the ideal of 1916 and the War of Independence. But was it really? Was the political philosophy of republicanism, to those who fought for independence, more important than the actual vision of the Ireland that would emerge-- one that usually concentrated on the Irish language, Irish folklore and traditions, and indeed Christianity? Pearse, the guiding spirit of the Rising, called for an Ireland that was "not free merely, but Gaelic as well; not Gaelic merely, but free as well". Modernists who cite the Proclamation of the Irish Republic usually cite the phrase, "cherishing all the children of the nation equally". But they tend to ignore the fact that the very first phrase of the Proclamation is "in the name of God."

For such a celebrated documentary, I can't help thinking The Rocky Road to Dublin is rather clumsily put together. One sequence features the Royal Dublin Horseshow, for no obvious reason (though Lennon rather implausibly tries to link it to the decline of the British Ascendancy in Ireland). Conor Cruise O'Brien, the intellectual and politician, is interviewed and gives a long account of Ireland's foreign policy-- which seems rather irrelevant to the overall theme of the documentary. Later on, there is a protracted scene of a man "playing the spoons" in an Irish pub. (Where would you see that now?) It's fascinating to watch, but again seems out of place.

There is a short wordless scene in which we see the then-new housing estate of Ballymun, where I grew up and where I am sitting right now, as I type these words. The grey towers and flats that it shows are now mostly pulled down-- one block of flats is actually being slowly demolished at present-- and good riddance to them, I say (with a faint twinge of nostalgia). But the tracts of green space that the camera shows in this documentary is all built over now, and the vandalism and litter that is almost omnipresent in Ballymun is also absent from the footage.

Lennon shoots a long sequence in a pub, which he does his very best to make gloomy and melancholy, with many shots of vacant and pensive faces-- and where couldn't you find such faces? But for all his efforts, I think most pub-goers of today will feel envious of the drinkers in the film, who have communal sing-alongs of Irish ballads rather than big-screen TVs and pop music drowning out conversation.

We move on to a section which shows a hurling match (and which does not neglect to zoom in on two Catholic priests enjoying it from the stands, doubtless in a sinister fashion). Lennon focuses on certain controversial rules of the Gaelic Athletic Association (the governing body of hurling and gaelic football, which are at the moment more spectacularly popular than ever). At the time of the documentary, the organisation had rules against its members playing "foreign" games such as soccer and rugby, and also had a law against members of the British security forces taking part. Both rules have now been removed, the second one in recent years, the first one not long after Lennon's documentary. But of course the rule against foreign games had a very practical motive-- it was a kind of athletic protectionism, to create a space for native games to flourish. And it worked.

The Assistant Secretary of the GAA, who is interviewed but not named, explains: "It is necessary, of course, to understand that this rule is retained democratically; the Association has a democratic system which is even more democratic than the normal parliamentary system. This rule could be changed at any time that a majority of the members of the Association wish to have it changed." We should at least give Lennon credit for including that explanation, which rather weakens the case he is trying to make.

There are some comic aspects to the documentary. The captions are so large, square, declarative and blunt that they remind one of Monty Python's "How to Recognise Different Trees" skit. And during one sequence on industrialisation, a Japanese gentleman in heavily-rimmed glasses (there are lots of heavily-rimmed glasses on display) explains that he is teaching Judo to the workers in the Guinness factory.

Another scene shows a group of Trinity students, gaunt and cigarette-smoking and dressed in polo-necks, overcoats, and shirtsleeves discussing censorship and the failings of the Irish press. Of course they are laying into the Church, the press, and the conservatism of RTE, rather stridently and excitedly. But where will we find such earnest, intellectually serious, publicly-spirited students today? Where are the sort of students we read about in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or even At Swim Two Birds or Anthony Cronin's Dead as Doornails? Do today's university students sit around in pubs arguing about politics and philosophy and emancipation? I've worked in a university library for over ten years now. I find the students to be polite, friendly and entirely endearing. But the conversations that I overhear, and the posters that I see around campus, leave me under no illusions that they are the heirs of Stephen Daedalus and the young Anthony Cronin. Could it be that something in grey, conformist, Catholic Ireland was propitious to that kind of student earnestness?

Lennon does not fail to linger on Ireland's censorship laws, which were indeed a sitting target. A long list of the names of writers banned in Ireland rolls down the screen at one point, to the sound of funeral bells, and though I am not against censorship on principle, it is hard to defend the laws that obtained in the Irish state for so long-- although I have often thought that the Playboy of the Western World riots, censorship of books, and so forth was a sign of a public more culturally alive than otherwise. Who would riot at a play today? Who today would take the power of ideas so seriously as to call for a book to be banned?

Perhaps the most remarkable part of The Rocky Road to Dublin is the extensive footage of Father Michael Cleary, the original "Father Trendy". We see him singing a pop song in a hospital ward, giving a speech at a wedding breakfast, and sharing a cigarette with some grave-diggers. We also hear him eloquently defending the Church's requirement of priestly celibacy, despite his own avowed desire to be married and have a family. "I believe that I get the tremendous power from God-- the power to recreate His body on the altar-- you know, I give him back a gift in return. Now, to someone you love and love deeply and to whom you owe a lot, you don't just give him sixpence-worth or a shilling's worth, you give him something that hurts, something you feel. And if I didn't miss marriage and all that goes with it, it wouldn't be a sacrifice..."

Of course, the irony is that Father Michael did not make such a sacrifice-- after his death, it was revealed that his housekeeper had been his common-law wife for 26 years, and that he had fathered a child by her. This, along with a similar revelation about Bishop Eamon Casey, is often cited (truly or falsely) as one of the catalysts of the Irish Catholic Church's decline in the nineties-- although it seems small beer compared to the horrors of clerical sex abuse that emerged later.

But for all his hypocrisy, Father Cleary seems like a rather amiable character, and nothing he actually says seems objectionable. The scene that shows wedding guests singing Irish patriotic ballads-- all of which they obviously know by heart-- makes me sad that we have lost so much of this folkloric heritage.

But at least Father Cleary and the other "forces of reaction" have the courage to appear on screen. A female voice, which we are informed belongs to a young wife, informs us (over footage of a sea-shore) that priests are always "on the men's side" when it comes to matters of sex and childbirth, and criticizes Church teaching on birth control. I imagine that Lennon could have found many female interviewees who were entirely supportive of Church teaching on sex, and who would have been happy to show their faces. But they do not appear. Just a disembodied voice over footage of the sea.

Perhaps the most poignant and haunting interview in The Rocky Road to Dublin is with Professor Liam O'Brien, a member of the censorship appeal board. Lennon must have seen this guy as a gift from heaven; he is almost a caricature of a hopeless reactionary, with sunken cheeks, wrinkled face, a shock of badly-combed white hair, a sober black suit and tie, and a habit of sucking his teeth for emphasis. He complains of the "horrible noises" of contemporary music and the "strum strum stum" of guitars. He denounces "pop orchestras", complains that the idea of sin has been abolished, and declares that "the Church is preparing for the fight, for the future fight against the future thought of mankind, and I am full of faith that...shall I say...that the gates of Hell shall not prevail."

So Lennon was probably rubbing his hands with glee as he edited this particular footage. But in fact it is actually the bewildered-looking, rather wild-eyed Professor O'Brien who makes the most insightful contribution to the whole documentary.

In the closing moments of the film, after denouncing "pop orchestras" and other aspects of modern culture, he says: "To give it its due, it is a break away from what was, into what is and what will be, and I suppose it will all acquire a character, acquire a tradition, it will acquire a...a mellowness which is not there yet. I think that's what's wrong with it really, that we are at a beginning of a new age, really a wonderful age in the world, but at the beginning of it, and therefore it hasn't any, so to speak, traditional character about it yet. But it's gaining it every moment, every day. And I wish it well, I wish it well. I won't see it. That's about all I can say about it."

The last shot of Professor O'Brien shows him looking rather pensively and sadly into the middle distance, as if he is doubtful of his own generous words. And isn't it clear now that they were, indeed, too generous?

Has popular culture, modern culture, consumer culture, attained the depth and maturity and mellowness that Professor O'Brien hoped for it?

Or has it become more lurid, more shallow, more dumbed-down and illiterate as the decades rolled on? Are the X-Factor and Damien Hirst and Beavis and Butthead the fruits that Sean O'Faolain had in mind when he sought liberation from an obscurantist Church?

Is the Ireland of 2012-- the Ireland in which we are becoming more and more acquainted with drug-addiction, gang warfare, prostitution, sex shops, homelessness, suicide, murder, family breakdown and tidal waves of clinical depression-- really closer to the ideals of the 1916 Rising than was the Ireland of 1967, as recorded in the Rocky Road to Dublin?

Is this the Ireland that Peter Lennon and those earnest Trinity students dreamed of?