Swear all you like on screen, Sister Rose is nun-plussed
Culver City – Tucked into a suburban Los Angeles office between her convent and a chapel, film critic Sister Rose Pacatte sits at her computer and plays a clip from edgy dark comedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
The numerous expletives in the award-winning movie don’t faze the 66-year-old Daughter of St Paul. Sitting at a desk surrounded by inspirational posters, a treadmill and a bobblehead of Pope Francis, she rates Three Billboards as her favourite movie of 2017.
“If you look at the pain people have, you have to expect some release,” she says of the story of an angry mother seeking justice for her daughter’s unsolved murder. “It was full of moments of exquisite grace and humanity – and it’s extremely funny!”
In an era when film critics’ influence has given way to social media buzz and fan approval, the diminutive Sister Rose has stood for the past 15 years as an intermediary between the big screen and America’s Catholic faithful.
“She’s like our vanguard for all things film,” said Chris Heffron, co-executive editor of the St Anthony Messenger, a monthly magazine with 400 000 monthly online visitors, that runs a column from Sister Rose.
Film has always played a leading role in the life of Sister Rose who, as a teenager, decided to become a nun, partly because of the St Bernadette biopic The Song of Bernadette and Catholic school comedy The Trouble with Angels.
This love for cinema goes hand-in-hand with the religious order, Daughters of St Paul, whose current members have adopted the hashtag #MediaNuns to connect people to the Church through media.
Sister Rose, who serves as director of the Pauline Centre for Media Studies in Culver City, California, does not restrict her reviews to religious or family themed films, casting a wide net from Sex and the City 2 to superhero blockbusters.
She called 2010 greed thriller Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps “the black ice that our prosperity as a nation travels on”.
Oscar-winner Spotlight in 2015, about the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal was a “finely underplayed and ultimately heartbreaking crime mystery”.
But behind her constant sunny disposition is a fascination with darker elements of human nature dramatised on the big screen. “A good movie will make us question the status quo,” she says. “It will make us question our behaviour. It will ask us how we can help relieve the suffering we may see ... humanity is such a brilliant subject.” – Reuters