"When I was in my early teens, I was both a devout churchgoer and an avid reader of mysteries. One of my favorite writers was P.D. James, whose Anglican faith informed her fiction in subtle ways. For James, the plotting and solving of murder was a grisly yet profoundly moral undertaking. A detective story, she wrote, "confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means.""
"The story takes place in and around a Catholic church at a small town in upstate New York, where a junior priest named Jud Duplenticy, played by a terrific Josh O'Connor, has been assigned to serve. Unfortunately, he's forced to work under Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, whom Josh Brolin plays as an angry fundamentalist firebrand, spewing hatred and contempt for gay people, single moms and the entire hell-bound secular world."
P.D. James's Anglican faith shaped her mysteries, which treated murder-solving as a moral act that affirmed a rational, beneficent universe. Rian Johnson's Wake Up Dead Man retools whodunit conventions into a sly, over-the-top spiritual inquiry set around a small-town Catholic church. The film centers on junior priest Jud Duplenticy and the vitriolic Monsignor Jefferson Wicks, and features a diverse ensemble including Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Jeremy Renner, Cailee Spaeny, Andrew Scott, and Daryl McCormack. Themes include fundamentalism, donor influence, addiction, political posturing, moral accountability, and the comic potential of a community in crisis.
Read at www.npr.org
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