The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Gritty cult director Ferrara gets religion in film ‘Padre Pio’
Abel Ferrara, whose gritty New York exploitation films of the 1980s and 1990s delved into the soulless evils of drug addiction, corruption and sexual violence, pays homage to one of Italy’s best-known and most revered saints in his newest film, “Padre Pio.”
That the film, which stars Shia LaBeouf and premieres at the Venice Film Festival next week, confirms a change of pace for the cult director is an understatement, one that Ferrara, 71, chalks up to a decade of sobriety and a new life in Italy.
“Once we kicked the drugs and the alcohol, we started to see a different way of life, of living in a different life,” the “Bad Lieutenant” director said in an interview in his new hometown of Rome. “I think it’s more just trying to get our game right.”
The film chronicles a particular moment in the 20th century history of Italy and Padre Pio, the mystic Capuchin monk best known for having displayed the “stigmata” wounds of Christ: He bled from his hands, feet and sides. Padre Pio died in 1968 and was canonized in 2002 by St. John Paul II, going on to become one of the most popular saints in Italy, the U.S. and beyond.
Ferrara’s treatment is no biopic, and frankly ignores some of the juiciest bits of the Padre Pio saga, which involved a dozen Vatican investigations into purported dalliances with women, alleged financial improprieties and doubts about the stigmatas. In their place, Ferrara weaves a parallel tale about the beginnings of fascism in Italy that is, unexpectedly, utterly relevant today.
The film takes as its starting point Padre Pio’s arrival at a Capuchin monastery in San Giovanni Rotondo, a poverty-wracked town in southern Italy, at the time its soldiers were returning home from World War I. The town was almost feudal-like, with the Catholic Church and wealthy large landowners trying to hold onto power amid the first inklings of Italy’s postwar socialist movement that saw factory unrest and peasant strikes.
Ferrara is well aware that his early genre work — he did the 1993 cult classic about a corrupt, drug-addicted cop “Bad Lieutenant,” and his earlier “The Driller Killer,” about a New York artist who randomly kills people with a power drill — gave him something of a reputation.