Image credit: Kate Jewell, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.
Mass Appeal is a quiet, dialogue-driven drama about faith, comfort, and the price of telling the truth, and Jack Lemmon’s performance as Father Tim Farley gives it both humour and moral weight. Directed by Glenn Jordan from Bill C. Davis’s play, the film stars Lemmon as the popular pastor of an affluent suburban Catholic parish, a priest who has built his success on folksy, reassuring sermons and on an instinct for keeping his congregation happy. When a young seminarian, Mark Dolson, played by Željko Ivanek, is assigned to his parish on trial, Farley’s comfortable world is challenged by a man who refuses to soften his convictions. Lemmon plays Farley as a man who is genuinely kind, genuinely funny, and genuinely afraid of what honesty might cost him. Father Tim Farley is, at first glance, a classic Lemmon character: warm, witty, a little vain, and very good at reading a room. He knows which jokes will make a parish dinner go well, which words will comfort a grieving family without disturbing them too much, and how to navigate the politics of his diocese. Lemmon plays that skill with affection. Farley is not a hypocrite in the simple sense. He believes in his parish, he loves his people, and he has convinced himself that keeping them comfortable is a form of pastoral care. The film’s interest lies in watching that conviction unravel, gently and then uncomfortably, as Dolson asks questions Farley has learned not to ask. Mark Dolson is Farley’s opposite in almost every way. He is young, intense, and uncompromising, and he challenges the Church on issues including the ordination of women, clerical celibacy, and the treatment of gay people, positions that were provocative in 1984 and that remain contested today. Ivanek plays Dolson with a sincerity that prevents him from becoming a mere mouthpiece, and Charles Durning is superb as Monsignor Thomas Burke, the diocesan official who watches the conflict with a mixture of political calculation and genuine concern. Lemmon’s scenes with both men are the film’s centre. With Dolson, he is by turns amused, irritated, protective, and threatened. With Burke, he is by turns deferential, cunning, and defiant. Lemmon’s ability to shift registers in a single conversation, from a joke to a warning to a confession, is what makes Farley feel like a real priest rather than a symbol. The film’s origins as a two-person play are evident in its structure. Much of Mass Appeal consists of conversations, in Farley’s office, in the church, over meals, in which two men argue about God, authority, and conscience. Jordan opens the play out just enough to show the parish itself: the comfortable homes, the well-dressed congregations, the social world that Farley has mastered. That world is part of the drama. Farley has something to lose, not only his position but his place in a community that loves him precisely because he does not disturb it. Lemmon understands that loss. When Farley drinks too much communion wine, or when he rehearses a sermon that he knows will please everyone and challenge no one, Lemmon plays the moment with a flicker of self-knowledge. Farley knows what he is doing, and he is not entirely proud of it. As the film progresses, Farley is forced to choose between protecting Dolson and protecting himself. He has persuaded Burke to give Dolson a trial, and he has grown fond of the young man, even as Dolson embarrasses him. When Dolson preaches a sermon that confronts the congregation with uncomfortable truths, Farley must decide whether to stand beside him or to distance himself. Lemmon plays that decision without melodrama. He does not deliver a grand speech about courage. He hesitates, he calculates, he feels the weight of his parishioners’ eyes, and then he acts. The power of the scene comes from Lemmon’s restraint: the audience can see, in his face, the comfortable priest and the more honest priest struggling with each other, and it is not clear, until the end, which one will win. Mass Appeal was not a box-office success, but it was admired for its performances and for its willingness to treat religious questions seriously without reducing them to a debate. Lemmon, who was raised with a complicated relationship to faith, brings a lived-in quality to Farley. He knows how priests talk, how they joke with parishioners, how they use humour to defuse tension, and how they carry doubt in private. That knowledge makes Farley credible even when the screenplay leans toward argument. The film does not resolve every question it raises, and that is its strength. It leaves Farley, and the audience, with a sense that faith is not a set of answers but a practice of attention, and that comfort, while kind, is not the same as truth. For Past Tunes readers, Mass Appeal is a fitting late entry in Lemmon’s run of 1970s and early 1980s dramas. After Save the Tiger, The China Syndrome, and Missing, here was another Lemmon character confronting a system, in this case his own Church, and discovering that integrity has a price. Farley is warmer and funnier than Harry Stoner or Ed Horman, but he faces the same essential dilemma: whether to keep things pleasant or to say what he believes. Lemmon plays that dilemma with a humanity that makes the film more than a period piece about Catholic politics. It becomes a story about any person who has built a life on being liked, and who wonders, late in that life, whether being liked is enough. Revisiting Mass Appeal today, its themes feel surprisingly current. Questions about who belongs in a faith community, about the gap between institutional teaching and personal conscience, and about the courage required to speak plainly in a comfortable room, have not gone away. Lemmon’s Father Tim Farley, funny, flawed, and finally brave in a quiet way, remains a compelling guide to those questions. That is why the role belongs among his signature performances, and why it provides a thoughtful close to this selection of Jack Lemmon films.