Tale of papal bromance worryingly close to an exercise in Vatican PR
The Two Popes 12A cert, 126 min
Dir Fernando Meirelles Starring Anthony Hopkins, Jonathan Pryce, Juan Minujín
The Two Popes is about a unique moment in papal history – the first resignation in 600 years, when the 85-year-old Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins) moved aside in 2013 to make way for his liberal successor, Pope Francis (Jonathan Pryce). It’s easy to relish this pair of Welsh acting heavyweights chewing the fat in cassocks – too easy.
The film has a two-handed conversational structure that might call to mind The Queen or Frost/nixon, but it’s strangely aimless, and too shallow to do right by its subject. Adapted by the none-too-reliable Anthony Mccarten (Darkest Hour, Bohemian Rhapsody) from his own play, it’s been directed by Fernando Meirelles (City of God) as an arbitrary mélange of news footage, stately tête-à-têtes and mismanaged period flashbacks. It presents the papal handover as a negotiation in stages, starting with the unexpected summons for Francis (or Cardinal Bergoglio, as he was then known) to visit Pope Benedict at his country retreat. This first encounter does not go well: on every topic from homosexuality to Vatican finances, they’re at loggerheads, making it surprising that Benedict, branded a Nazi by his foes, wound up grooming a successor so dogma-averse and famously unextravagant.
The sight of Pryce stopping off by a roadside café to don his proper vestments gets a chuckle, and the film is full of these scattered amusements, like the sight of Hopkins – relaxed and playful almost throughout – guzzling pizza and obeying a Fitbit. All this cuddly, pope-com bromance stuff might sound very cute, but thanks to some fairly grotesque evasions at the centre, it comes off like fiddling while Rome burns.
Months later at the Vatican, the two grow closer in the process of offloading dark confessions to each other. For Bergoglio, this is the taint of his involvement in 1976’s violent military junta, which has made him hugely divisive in his country. The flashbacks to this scary epoch, where he’s played as a troubled go-between by Juan Minujín, ask us to consider the bleeding conscience of a man who in real life has repeatedly shut such questions down.
The film has an even poorer strategy for dramatising what Benedict knew about priests’ sex crimes. He asks Bergoglio to take his confession, and when he starts to whisper about a particular case, the film kills the sound and shuts the door on us. Coming as it does after the fieriest recent film on this subject, François Ozon’s the way this swishes curtains across the whole issue is troublesome in the extreme.
An exercise in bonding through mutual exculpation, it’s worryingly close to being great PR for the papacy. The actors are blameless, just as the set design – including a recreation of the Sistine Chapel – isn’t the problem.
Pryce works hard with what he’s got: he might have excelled with another script. Was Benedict just dumping all the Church’s problems in Bergoglio’s lap? And what’s it like to have a pope emeritus skulking about in the Vatican’s corridors, judging your every move? There’s a film, maybe. Alas, this one has thrown in the towel – the duo are last seen settling in for Germanyargentina’s 2014 World Cup final, popping beers on a sofa while jaunty music swells. TR