Papal pleaser
Pontification has never been this much fun, as two great actors and beautiful images pull us in to tale of Vatican in need of change
“The Two Popes” has been the surprise blessing of the fall film-festival season, with acclaim continuing through awards season.
Its title and subject might lead to the assumption of a movie designed for the pious and destined for church basements or Sunday morning TV. On the contrary, this is a crowdpleaser for believers and agnostics alike.
Wise to Catholicism and also human nature, this charming two-hander by Fernando Meirelles (“City of God”) is based on the true story of former pope Benedict’s 2013 retirement from the Roman Catholic papacy and Pope Francis’s unlikely ascendancy to it. The screenplay is by Anthony McCarten, who found the grin beneath the grim in “Darkest Hour” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
There’s much pleasure to be had and awards to be anticipated, watching Sir Anthony Hopkins as Benedict, the German pope of dogma and reason, verbally spar with Jonathan Pryce as Francis, the Latin American pope of compassion and empathy.
“The Two Popes” forges dramedy from the entirely believable backstage manoeuvring that ensued when Benedict, at the age of 85, decided he’d become too old and frail to continue with the physically demanding and mentally taxing job of being spiritual leader to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. He shocked
the world and his church by becoming the first Roman Catholic pontiff in more than 700 years to abdicate.
Benedict was succeeded by Pope Francis, the name taken by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, who hadn’t sought the job and humbly resisted it: “I’m a scholar, not a manager.”
Benedict is one of the people doing the arm-twisting, as this story goes, although he has his doubts.
He disagrees with Bergoglio’s liberal views on many matters of faith — “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?” he says at one point, during an encounter in the Vatican garden.
A lover of classical music and opera, Benedict also raises an eyebrow over the Argentine cardinal’s proletarian ways: He bikes rather than rides a limo, follows soccer games religiously and whistles ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” in the men’s room.
Benedict is big on protocol and tradition — he the was enforcer of dogma for his predecessor, John Paul II — and his preferred type of music is classical and opera.
He consider himself a realist and Bergoglio an idealist. Yet the outgoing pope is wise enough to realize that the times are a-changing, and the majority of Catholics yearn for a more loving and forgiving approach to their faith.
The bonus of “The Two Popes” is the cinematography of César Charlone, who bathes the Vatican corridors and gardens with a luminous light that makes this delightful pairing of Hopkins and Pryce seem all the more heavenly.
Is that golden smoke coming from the Vatican chimney?
Francis bikes rather than rides a limo, follows soccer games religiously and whistles ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” in the men’s room