A LEAP OF FAITH
Solid biopic of a nun to be reckoned with never quite achieves inspirational liftoff
Cabrini, an illuminating if workmanlike portrait of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, tells the story of the woman behind the name that has graced hundreds of shrines, hospitals, parks and schools around the world. In this handsomely filmed chronicle of Cabrini's rise — from a small parish in Lombardy, Italy, to late-19th-century New York City — a woman who at first glance was a modest, physically frail nun emerges as a fiercely determined figure who battled sexism, xenophobia and her own ailments to give radical meaning to the words “on Earth as it is in heaven.” As Pope Leo XIII tells her in one of their several respectful but spiky conversations, “I can't tell where your faith ends and your ambition begins.”
Pope Leo is played in a wonderfully warm performance by the great Giancarlo Giannini, who gives Cabrini a jolt of life every time he appears onscreen. David Morse and John Lithgow also show up, as a recalcitrant archbishop and peevish New York mayor, respectively; they, along with various priests and bullying naysayers, exemplify the male power structure that Cabrini routinely confronted and shrewdly disarmed as she sought to treat New York's impoverished immigrant population with generosity and respect. (The central conflict here is Cabrini's attempts to fund and build her first hospital.)
Cristiana Dell'Anna brings a watchful sense of determination and calm to Cabrini, whom filmmaker Alejandro Monteverde, directing from Rod Barr's script (the two co-wrote the film's story), casts as an early feminist avatar. Audiences might remember Monteverde as the filmmaker behind last summer's Sound of Freedom; that film became a huge hit but also got caught up in culture-war fights about QAnon and conspiracy theories. (The faith-based company Angel Studios released both films.) In this outing, Monteverde downplays his subject's spirituality in favour of critiquing an insensitive, outof-touch Catholic hierarchy and immigration policies he clearly sees as all too relevant today.
As was the case with Sound of Freedom, the production values of Cabrini are solid, if obvious and uninspired: The narrative unfolds in a pageant-like series of expository scenes, filmed in subdued sepia tones, with Gene Back's musical score providing prodigious swells of melodramatic bathos. The Big Bad Men who block Cabrini at every turn veer into Snidely Whiplash caricature, much as the evildoers in Sound of Freedom did. Still, as a straightforward biopic of a woman whose name is much better known than her story, Cabrini fulfils its mission with the same purposeful earnestness of its subject. It's a movie even the most secular of humanists can love.