Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral is an observant, broken photo album of a film. If you ever had a close relationship with your father, you might think of him as you watch Brian d’Arcy James’ skilled and layered performance as Richard, a man desperate to keep his head above water in terms of how we measure success. The Tony Award nominee paints the complex portrait of someone who cannot keep up with the expectations of a fast-paced, financially successful society, but instead of making him pathetic, he makes his character relatable. d’Arcy James has been nominated for an Indie Spirit Award for Best Supporting Performance, and a win would be huge for a film of this scale.
I keep using the word ‘observant’ to describe D’Ambrose’s film, because it feels as if we are a distant relative invited to a family gathering watching the action. Are we a family member designated to a corner chair as a party unfolds? Perhaps we are the one who totes around one of those comically cumbersome video cameras insisting that we capture every moment. The Cathedral is a singular portrait of one family’s casual evolution, and that singularity stuck out to the actor when he read the script.
“Its uniqueness stuck out to me–this script was unlike anything that I have read before,” James said candidly. “I didn’t know Ricky’s prior film, so when I was able to compare this script to his first feature, I could see that he has a very definitive aesthetic and particular voice. I am not a cinephile, so I am not deep in the encyclopedia of films or experimental filmmaking. I did recently watch Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, and I brought that up in my meetings with Ricky. His script reminded me of that film. Malick’s film was about shards of memory, and the outer structure was about the origins of the universe. For me, I thought there was a parallel while substituting the origins of the universe with cultural events of the ’80s. That served as a framing device of Jesse’s memory in The Cathedral.
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