The Boys of St. Vincent.

In one of his poems, Bertolt Brecht looks at a Japanese carved mask representing the visage of an evil demon.

Sympathetically I observe

The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating

What a strain it is to be evil.

The strain of evil is stamped on the face of Brother Peter Lavin, the fearsome yet pathetic orphanage superintendent in The Boys of Saint Vincent, John N. Smith's searing Canadian film about the consequences of pedophilia. It is a furious face which constantly threatens to disintegrate before our eyes. It is a twisted face, most often twisted in scorn but sometimes in self-pity. Actor Henry Czerny's looks are faintly similar to Sam Neill's, but even when Neill plays a sexually repressed man in The Piano, his glamour shines through the character's neuroses. By contrast, Czerny makes Lavin a man so encased in the armor of self-righteousness that even the embers of his humanity have been stamped out. A child's faint effort to escape Brother Lavin's lascivious embraces is treated by the superintendent as an act of delinquency, almost impiety. Acts of compassion are regarded as sabotage and, when another brother's mealtime grace turns into an appeal for God's mercy, Lavin takes the prayer as a personal affront.

And Lavin, of course, is right. Independence, kindness, and genuine piety are threats to Lavin's rule, for he has used his authority to create an institution that is quite plausible in its everyday functioning (the kids are taught and fed and clothed adequately) and utterly rotten at its core. The structure reflects its creator. Lavin's angry countenance and rigid body, after all, might pass as the bearing of an ultra-competent man baffled by incompetence or laxity. But look closely at Lavin's face as the camera closes in on it and you can see that the man fully comprehends his own abomination, but his outer layer of consciousness, which manifests itself as self-righteous fury, keeps him rolling along and trampling right over others.

The first half of Saint Vincent is virtually a horror movie with Lavin as the vampire lord of the castle. The very first shot under the credits is classically spooky: the Newfoundland orphanage and the adjoining church are viewed at twilight; the cross that tops the church spire reaches up into a wintry blue sky; a boys' choir sings the praises of the Lord while dry tree branches whisper and click in the wind. We may well wonder if we're about to see a less supernatural offspring of The Exorcist.

But it is director Smith's genius to show how enormity can coexist with normality and how normality cloaks enormity. Once we get inside the orphanage, everything seems plausible...for a while. The boys recite their catechism and their lessons. They collect old clothes from the townspeople for school fund-raising. There is a normal amount of horseplay and it's treated indulgently enough by the brothers. And when one lad sasses a teacher, he's not severely punished. An elderly brother lends a promisingly intelligent boy named Kevin books and quizzes him as to how he likes them. Christmas preparations are underway, as well as some big plans to coax money out of a city council to build an ice hockey rink to be affiliated with the school. How could anything be wrong at Saint Vincent?

But why does Kevin wash his body with such spasmodic vigor in the shower room? Why is he summoned so often and so late in the day to Brother Lavin's office, and why is he so reluctant to go? And why are the halls and dormitories at night so crepitant not just with the normal nocturnal sounds that all large houses make but with sighs, moans, whimpering, and--worst of all--sibilant, insinuating whispers?

The decency and diligence of three men--a janitor, a police detective, and that aforementioned book-lending brother--end the horror and force the obfuscating church bureaucracy to terminate Lavin's reign. But Lavin isn't arrested, publicly denounced, or even punished. He and two other pedophiles on the staff are packed off for "treatment" and into obscurity. A new superintendent takes charge. The relieved city council--"We can't be seen giving a million dollars to a bunch of perverts"--can now close the hockey rink deal. The Christmas celebrations are a grand success. And, at night, the whispering continues while a boy's voice softly petitions, "Please...please, Brother, I want to get some sleep."

Thus, on a terrifying note of plus ca change, closes part 1, which could pass as a self-contained little masterpiece of horror if part 2 did not exist.

For it is with part 2 that John Smith and his scriptwriters (Des Walsh and Sam Grana) ask really tough questions, dare to provoke and even exasperate us, and bring us face to face not with the easily detectable villainy of part 1, but with that infuriating but all-too-human trait that Baudelaire defined when he said, "I see the best but I do the worst."

It is fifteen years later. Lavin, no longer a brother but still a church-going, rosary-fingering Catholic and a married man with two children, is arrested. A district attorney, determined to bring the long-suppressed crimes to light, subpoenas Kevin and several of the former wards, including Steve, who in part 1 was a tough, likable little con artist and who is now a drug-hustling, drug-taking wreck. Time has wrought great changes in all concerned and these changes bring us up short, complicate our feelings, and deny us any pat conclusions.

For one thing, the strain of evil is no longer on Lavin's face. In fact, helping his wife in the kitchen, he seems surprisingly relaxed, happy, superficially decent. At this point, we may ask ourselves if time itself doesn't put criminals beyond the reach of the law by rendering their former evil unrecognizable to themselves. But even if we think that a (possibly) reformed Lavin should still be punished, there is something else to consider: standing beside him as he is arrested are Lavin's wife, Chantal (played to heartbreaking perfection by Lise Roy), and his children. The kids are bewildered; Chantal is devastated. And it's not just the matter of public disgrace. They clearly love Lavin and they are seeing their loved one beginning to be destroyed. Must Lavin's family be destroyed so that he can be punished?

Worse: Kevin, Lavin's main victim, is to be the star witness and the obligation to examine his memories tortures him. By contrast, Steve seems eager to testify for the sake of vengeance. But, with his body and mind discombobulated by drugs, is he really ready to testify? Will the trial purge these youths of horror or drown them in it? Their contrasting performances on the witness stand give us a double answer: the revelation of past evil can either destroy or redeem. But even the one who survives comes perilously close to catastrophe.

And Lavin and his family? The family is destroyed but out of its wreckage Chantal may make a better life for herself and her children because now at last she sees clearly what Lavin is and what she must do to put him behind her.

But Lavin himself can go nowhere spiritually because he has continued lying. In part 1, he lied to the authorities to conceal his crime. In part 2, he lies to his wife and his lawyer and his psychiatrist (Lavin's brilliant and bloodchilling conning of the last will not give any comfort to the male sensitivity movement), but most of all he lies to himself. In the shattering denouement, Lavin, finding himself completely alone, starts to crumble, his eyes fill with tears, his mouth twitches. Then he jumps to his feet and slams the table in front of him several times. Slams away his budding recognition of his fallen nature and the unexpungeable harm it has done to others. Slams himself back into the spiritual armor of self-righteousness and despisal of others, slams himself back into the solitary confinement that is his life. He subsides for a moment. Then he rears back up and pounds twice more. The End. If there has ever been a harsher leave-taking of a character in a play or film than this one, I haven't seen it.

Is The Boys of Saint Vincent fair to the Catholic church? Well, not if we take it as journalism. It doesn't adduce dozens of well-run, wholesome Catholic orphanages to counter the portrait of hell that is Saint Vincent. True, there is that one elderly brother who helps rescue Kevin in part 1, but it's likely that some members of the audience will come away from this picture with an impression not much different from that of the dizzbrain who, in one of the movie's more satirical sequences, phones a radio talk show to contribute the usual "you get these priests with their vows of celibacy alone in a house with a bunch of boys and ya just know...."

But is this film journalism? Is it mainly a muckraking expose? I don't think so. It is a work of dramatic poetry. To say this is not to grant the movie a license to be one-sided or otherwise unfair but to indicate what sort of truth it is trying to tell. Its truth is not a matter of stating a social problem fairly, of setting up equal members of good priests against bad priests, of citing statistics which comfort against statistics which blast. The Boys of Saint Vincent is a portrait of irreducible evil, the finest that has appeared on screen since the Dutch film, The Vanishing. When Lavin slams the goodness out of his heart just before the final credits roll, we find ourselves confronting a spiritual deformity that no reformation of church policy can mitigate, against which no legislation can prevail.

(The Boys of Saint Vincent will be shown nationally on Arts and Entertainment Cable in the fall.)