WILD APPLAUSE Roache, Tom Wilkinson, Cathy Tyson. Directed by Antonia Bird. (Not rated; 103 minutes. At the Bridge).

Because film by its very nature is steeped in images of the real world and oriented in action, it has trouble capturing a sense of the spiritual. But it is precisely that elusive sense, emerging from the mire of sin and guilt, that makes "Priest" an exceptional movie.

There has been a smattering of complaint about "Priest," opening today at the Bridge in San Francisco (it's due later at other Bay Area theaters) from conservative Roman Catholics. The complaint seems misplaced. This powerful drama looks at the tortured soul of a gay priest and comes up with a curiously inspiring statement about faith and morality.

"Priest," from Britain's Antonia Bird ("Safe"), won the Audience Prize at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Set in inner-city Liverpool, it stars the hot young British actor Linus Roache as the Rev. Greg Pilkington, a dutiful, idealistic diocesan priest assigned to a tough parish to replace an older clergyman who has lost his marbles because of the pressures of working in grim, poor neighborhoods.


Full of a desire to do right in his new job, Father Greg hits a snag almost the minute he arrives. He discovers that the gregarious parish pastor, the Rev. Matthew Thomas (Tom Wilkinson, who plays Mr. Pecksniff in the PBS serial of Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit"), is living an essentially married life with the parish housekeeper, Maria, played by Cathy Tyson ("Mona Lisa").

Tyson has one of the film's best lines when she steps forward to confirm that celibacy is no longer part of Father Matthew's calling.

This discovery opens a painful rift between the two men. Father Matthew is a progressive whose approach is to bend the rules to serve the wild cards of humanity. But young Father Greg is adamant that church doctrine, however severe, should be followed to the letter in service to God.

Greg's ideals are thrown into a spinning

hell of self-doubt and guilt after he dons a leather jacket to venture into a gay club and gives in to his sexual desire for a young man he meets named Graham (Robert Carlyle).

Things get worse when the next day a young girl confesses to Father Greg that she is being abused by her father. Bound by the seal of confession, and tormented by the evil around him and his guilt about his sexual identity, Greg's moral convictions begin to unravel. But he keeps his troubles to himself.


Fans of novelist Graham Greene may recognize a touch of the tortured discussions of faith and morality that crop up in his books -- at one point Greg weighs the agonies of his soul in a rambling speech during a seaside walk with his gay friend. But he's essentially talking to himself.

Roache plays the priest so deftly you get a rare sense of a man's inner struggle, and of his inability to ease up on himself because he takes his responsibilities as a clergyman so seriously. It's an amazing performance that makes utterly human a man's quest for spiritual truth while he tries to hide from the truth about himself.

This film is extraordinary for the themes it explores -- sometimes with delicious humor -- beyond the obvious. It's one thing to see a man struggle to find himself, another for a film to carry the fight to a luminous moment that brings that struggle into the larger world where differing visions of truths contend.

All of this is played out against a background of a working-class parish filled with strong characters who make their mark, for better or worse, in telling moments on the screen.

The movie becomes a fascinating glimpse at a vast subject -- intolerance vs. understanding. There's some preachiness in "Priest," and yet you go away feeling the embrace of something lovely and spiritual.