Movie Review: The Two Popes

The Two Popes *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Fernando Meirelles.

Written by: Anthony McCarten.

Starring: Jonathan Pryce (Pope Francis), Anthony Hopkins (Pope Benedict), Juan Minujín (Pope Francis Young), Sidney Cole (Cardinal Turkson), Federico Torre (Medina Estevez), Pablo Trimarchi (Militar), Juan Miguel Arias (Paolo Gabriele), Lisandro Fiks (Father Jalics), María Ucedo (Esther Ballestrine).

 

I am not Catholic, but my wife is, and I remember how upset she got when she found out that Pope Benedict was resigning from being Pope. She didn’t particularly like Benedict – she is a progressive Catholic is most ways, but believes, much like the character of Pope Francis does in The Two Popes, that Popes cannot and should not resign. Having two Popes – even if one isn’t technically Pope anymore – was something that made her very upset.

 

The Two Popes is about that very idea. It takes place the year before Pope Benedict (Anthony Hopkins) resigns when he invites the future Pope Francis (Jonathan Pryce) to the Vatican. Francis thinks it is because he has asked to retire – but it’s not that. Benedict knows that the future Francis got a number of votes when Benedict was elected – and could well become Pope when he resigns. The two disagree on pretty much everything – but Benedict, in his wisdom, thinks that perhaps it is he who is wrong – or at least, out of touch. He wants to get to know the man who may take over for him.

 

What follows is basically a two hander for two terrific veteran actors at the top of their game. You can complain – and perhaps justly – that they cast two Welsh actors to play an Argentinan and a German, but you cannot argue with their performances. Hopkins has often been on cruise control over the past 20 years or so, but there’s little denying that when he wants to be, and is given the chance, he can still deliver a great performance. His Pope Benedict is a stubborn man in many ways – and out of touch. He knows nothing except for the Church and its teachings. He has been so inside its politics for so long that he has lost touch with everything else – which has led to some of the worst things the Catholic Church has ever done in its long, not so great history. He is also a very smart man – someone well taught, and well-spoken. He always wanted to be Pope, but now that he is, he is more isolated than ever. He can see that the Church needs to change, but also that he will never be able to make those changes himself.

 

Pryce is given the more plum role of the future Pope Francis – a man of principle, a man of the people who has spent so much time with the poor, that he is better able to see precisely what it is that they need. He is horrified by the child molestation scandal, how the church treats the poor from their own opulent houses of worship, and how the church refuses to modernize. He is also ashamed of his own past – which he will eventually tell Pope Benedict is a moving sequence – the mistakes of a young priest, that still haunt him decades later. You will undeniably favor Pope Francis – as the movie does – but come to respect both men.

 

The film gives these two greats actors a chance to play off each other. It was based on a play by Anthony McCarten – who also wrote the screenplay, but I don’t think the play was ever produced. It feels like a stage piece in many ways – the director, Fernando Meirelles, doesn’t do much except let the pair of actors go, and dive into their lines with all they have. It is enough to make the film very entertaining – even all if it is all talk, for more than two hours.

 

And yet, for me, the film pulls its punches a little too much. We all know the role Pope Benedict plays in covering up the clergy molestation scandal that has rocked – and continues to rock – the church. The film briefly mentions it near the beginning of their first meeting, but Pope Benedict shuts it down just as quickly. Late in the film, Benedict will ask the future Pope Francis to hear his confession – and we hear enough to know what it will be about, but then the sound cuts out, and we do not hear the rest. Leaving this mostly unsaid – simply alluded to – allows you to still like and respect both men – and yet also, it feels like perhaps the most important thing is left unsaid in the film. The film feels incomplete unless they are going to address the elephant in the room – and it feels like the film does just enough so that you cannot complain they didn’t address it at all, and then immediately cuts it off.

 

That’s a shame really – because it really does feel like Pryce and Hopkins are going on all cylinders here, digging into their juicy roles, and giving it there all. Hopkins is of course one of the most celebrated actors of his generation - an Oscar winner, and multiple nominee, beloved by many. Pryce has always felt to too overlooked – you look back at his career, and it’s full of great work, and yet he has never even been nominated for an Oscar, let alone won one. He’s always great – and he is certainly equal to the task of going toe-to-toe with Hopkins.

 

If the movie were as good as the two actor in it, then this would one of the great films of the year. It isn’t – and it’s because it pulls back, when it needs to push forward. It’s too bad – the church needs this type of dialogue, and needs it at the highest levels, and out in the open. Even if it’s in a work of fiction like this.

Movie Review: 360

360
Directed by: Fernando Meirelles.
Written by: Peter Morgan.
Starring: Lucia Siposová (Mirka), Gabriela Marcinkova (Anna), Johannes Krisch (Rocco), Jude Law (Michael Daly), Jamel Debbouze (Algerian Man), Dinara Drukarova (Valentina), Vladimir Vdovichenkov (Sergei), Rachel Weisz (Rose), Juliano Cazarré (Rui), Maria Flor (Laura), Ben Foster (Tyler), Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Fran), Anthony Hopkins (Older Man), Mark Ivanir (The Boss).

It takes talent to make what Roger Ebert has dubbed the “hyperlink” movie, where a series of seemingly unconnected characters and events come together through some tenuous connections. In recent years, we’ve seen some interesting (if not entirely successful) versions of this from Paul Haggis (Crash) and Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu (Babel, Amores Perros). But the genre has deep roots – Robert Altman was a master at them (especially in Nashville and Short Cuts), and one of his biggest admirers Paul Thomas Anderson gave us a brilliant one (Magnolia). For the new film 360, director Fernando Meirelles and writer Peter Morgan look back even further – to the work of Arthur Schnitzler who wrote La Ronde, which was turned into a film by the great Max Ophuls in 1950. That film, and the play it was based on, takes place in 1900 Vienna, and every scene is a two hander between two lovers – that eventually breaks off and one of the characters moves onto the next scene, with another lover. That whole movie took place in one city, and eventually comes full circle, so that the prostitute played by Simone Signoret is involved in both the first and last scenes of the movie. The key to making La Ronde work was the simplicity of it structure, and because Ophuls never too it too seriously – he knows its slightly ridiculous, and has fun with the concept of drawing together the classes in his stories of love and lust (and it helped to have the great Anton Walbrook be the acid tongued narrator). In 360 having all the action in one city must have seemed too easy – we are in the era of globalization after all – so this film trots the globe, from various European cities to North America and back again. This could have worked, except for the fact that Meirelles and Morgan take the whole damn thing so seriously that the movie turns out mainly to be a long, dull slog. Individual performances and scenes work, but the end result never comes together.

The movie begins in Vienna, where a young Hungarian woman Mirka (Lucia Sipsova) shows up for an audition with a sleazy pimp to become a prostitute. Her first client is a visiting auto executive (Jude Law), whose wife (Rachel Weisz) is having an affair with a Brazilian photographer (Juliano Cazarre), whose girlfriend Laura (Maria Flor) finds out and decides to go home, and meets a grieving father (Anthony Hopkins) on the play, and then a just released sex offender (Ben Foster) while stranded in an airport. Eventually, this will lead back to Europe, and once again the circle is complete.

I suppose this could have worked, but while Ophuls was able to depict the differences between the classes, and make them all equal, while still making a light, breezy comedy, Meirelles and Morgan insist on making this film so serious that it’s deadly. Jude Law can be a good actor, but he seems lifeless in this role – and Weisz isn’t any better as his wife. Every time I think Weisz is moving forward from her normally overly mannered performances (like with her great work in The Deep Blue Sea earlier this year), she takes a step back. More successful is Hopkins, who is saddled with possibly the most clichéd and unbelievable role, but still finds the pain underneath it all to make it seem real. There is no doubt that Maria Flor is a beauty your eyes are instantly drawn to – I just wish she was given a more believable character to play. Ben Foster is his usual twitchy self as the sex offender, and while we’ve seen him do this before – and better – at least he’s interesting. The movie also adds a series of useless characters who simply get in the way – Mariann Jean Baptiste as a social worker, Jamel Debouzze as a Muslim widow struggling with his sexual feelings, who shows up at random early in the film, and then takes more than an hour before he reappears and his reasons for being in the movie become clear and Mark Ivanir as a clichéd sadistic gangster who is annoying in his every moment.

360 also clutters the beautiful simplicity of Schnitzler’s original structure in La Ronde. The film tries to cram too much in – and often times, the intercutting between stories (especially when the movie is in America) quite simply doesn’t work. What’s odd is how easy it would have been to streamline the movie – to simplify it to a point where it would work.

360 is a major disappointment for both Meirelles and Morgan. Meirelles broke through with his brilliant 2002 film City of God, depicting the slums of Rio de Janerio in his native Brazil. Since then he made a very good John LeCarre adaptation in The Constant Gardener, and mistakenly adapted Jose Saramago’s brilliant novel Blindness, and turned it into the best movie version imaginable of a book that should never have been made into a movie. Each of his films seems to have less of the propulsive energy that made City of God so brilliant, and finally in 360, he has made a film so subdued that you just may fall asleep watching it. As for Morgan, he has written some great screenplays in his career – The Last King of Scotland, The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Damned United – but like the last film he wrote, the horrible Clint Eastwood film Hereafter, 360 simply proves that perhaps he works better on more narrowly focused films, with fewer characters. When he tries to go big and write one of these “we are all connected” movies, his characters lack focus and depth. There are moments in 360 that work beautifully – especially a moving speech delivered by Hopkins at an AA meeting – but it all adds up to nothing.