Although many, I think, will give The Two Popes a positive rating based on its ostensible good intentions, the film fails even at that level. In fact, the movie's intentions are dishonorable. Although Anthony Hopkins as Pope Benedict and Jonathon Price playing Jorge Bugoglio, the Argentine who became Pope Francis are pretty good and, in earlier scenes, even thrilling, the picture is ultimately so evasive as to become, illegible. Despite some early scenes that seem to stake out the positions of the two principals in an illuminating and highly dramatic manner, the picture slips into sentimentality marking a really troubling fundamental malaise -- we don't know what the two men represent or why they behave as they do. The film's inability to effectively probe motives arises from larger symptoms that concern the role of the Catholic Church in the modern world. That problem hasn't been solved and, so, of course, the movie also remains unresolved on any meaningful level. Concluding the film with an extended sequence of the two pontiffs bonding like Milwaukee cheese-heads at Green Bay over a soccer game demonstrates the problem: the fate of the world's largest religion is at stake and these two morons are quarreling over fouls in a football game.
The Two Popes (Ferdinand Meirelles) is principally a biography of Jorge Bugoglio. (Here the word "hagiography" is literally applicable -- some may argue that the warts on Bugoglio's biography cut against hagiography. This is not so, any good biography of a Saint must begin with the Holy Man's doubts and errors overcome by the power of Christ.) Bugoglio is preaching in a slum, among colorful primitive murals, when he is summoned to Rome. Pope John Paul II has died. In the conclave in the Sistine Chapel, Bugoglio garners a number of votes. He isn't campaigning. By contrast, the formidable Josef Ratzinger, is seeking the papacy -- someone notes that Plato said the chief qualification for high office is not wanting the office. Ultimately, Ratzinger prevails. In this part of the film, effective use is made of newsreel footage of the funeral of the old Pope. A mighty wind sweeps across Vatican City implying that change is afoot. But, Ratzinger as Benedict is a traditionalist and doesn't do anything to reform the Church. Instead, he becomes embroiled in destructive controversies about the Church's banking and its pervasive culture of sexual abuse of minors (the latter point is downplayed and here we perceive the first evidence of the film's creeping and evasive blurriness). Bugoglio is disenchanted with his role as Bishop of the Argentine Church and would like to retire to become a "simple parish priest." He books a flight to Rome to submit his resignation personally to the Pope since his letters requesting leave from the role of Bishop have been ignored. After getting his plane tickets to Rome, he is summoned by the Pope. Bugoglio thinks this is because the Pope wants to discuss his resignation with him. He flies to Rome and is driven to the Papal summer palace, a spectacular site on the edge of a volcanic caldera. As it turns out the Pope has not agreed to this resignation and refuses to accept it. He perceives Bugoglio's resignation as an implicit criticism of the Holy See and angrily denounces the Argentine for his liberalism. There follows a fierce debate between the two men that is the best thing in the film. Benedict is wearing a fit-bit watch that periodically hectors him to keep walking -- he is trying to walk 10,000 paces a day. (The watch, later also worn by Francis, is a symbol -- it suggests that the Catholic Church most "keep moving," that is progressing with the world around it.) In this debate, Bugoglio advocates (cautiously) for reform and argues that the Church must not remain static because God himself changes; when Benedict reacts with indignation, Bugoglio says that history shows that God is "moving toward us." This sequence ends with a flashback to 1956, in which we see Bugoglio as a young man courting a woman and dancing the tango. Bugoglio is working as a lab technician and, on the way to proposing, he hears plaintive music coming from a church -- the spiritual "Nobody knows the Trouble I've Seen." He enters the Church confesses to a dying priest (the man has leukemia) and, then, accepts his vocation to become a priest. This is all conventional stuff -- of course, priests must be shown as passionate, even aggressive, heterosexual lovers, before they entered the priesthood, but the sequence is shot in lustrous black and white and one scene featuring a huge jacaranda tree with buttress roots at night in a garden is literally breathtaking. (Much of the film is physically beautiful).
After their contentious debate, which shows irreconcilable differences between them, the two old men, after dinner (Benedict eats alone) reminisce. Benedict plays a You-tube clip of Thelonious Monk and, when he misses some notes while playing piano, says that he sounds like "Stockhausen." Music is important to him and he plays an old Nazi-era cabaret song by Zarah Leander. (In Durs Gruenbein's great sonnet-cycle about the destruction of Dresden, Porzellan, the sickly-sweet music of Zarah Leander is a symbol for the corruption of the Nazis and their kitsch culture -- in the film, it's hard to know what is meant since the picture is evasive about Benedict's past, particularly his role in the Nazi era.) Benedict is lonely, humorless, and aware that everyone dislikes him. He plaintively notes that the more people get to know him, the less they like him. The Vatican staff regards his culinary tastes (South Bavarian meatballs in lemon soup) as literally revolting -- to the suave Italians Benedict is just a German invader, a barbarian, and, behind his back, people call him "Nazi". There are more flashbacks, particularly to 1978 when the military junta seized power in Argentina. This portion of the film is very unclear, poorly shot and edited, and euphemistic in its portrayal of some of the horrors of the era -- Bugoglio tries to protect Jesuits in his order who are protesting the regime, although he apparently does this in a low-key, secretive, and highly ineffective manner. The result is that a number of priests are tortured for months and, then, rendered unconscious by injection, before being pitched into the sea from helicopters. Bugoglio has tried to accommodate the tyrannical regime and seems to have supported them -- the film's thesis here is a questionable one: if you know exactly what Bugoglio did to oppose the regime you would admire him, but you don't know, and he won't tell, and so we're left with public perception that Bugoglio, in fact, supported the regime. In any event, we see him exiled to Cordoba, poor and mountainous area in the Andes. There he becomes successful as a parish priest and, gradually, works his way up the hierarchy again to become the Bishop of Argentina. The film intermittently shows us a barren mountaintop, apparently in the Andes -- at first, the landscape is puzzling, but we gradually come to see that the mountain represents Bugoglia's personal Golgotha, or better stated, the Mount of Olives where he goes alone to pray and brood over the world. At this point, the film starts to dissolve into sentimentality -- for reasons that are never clearly stated, Benedict has chosen Bugoglio for his successor and admits that he intends to resign: "I am a scholar, not a manager" he says, citing a curious supernatural omen: smoke from a candle that he extinguished flowed down and not up to heaven, suggesting that God has withdrawn his approval from Benedict's papacy. (Bugoglio cites an omen of his own -- he bought his plane ticket to Rome before learning the Pope had summoned him.) Benedict is suffering a spiritual crisis and he feels that God is not answering his prayers and doesn't speak to him any more: "I was alone all my life, but God was with me," Benedict says. But now he's not sure and has decided to abdicate the Papal Throne. This is all explicable. But what is inexplicable, in the terms of the film, is why Benedict has chosen Bugoglio as his appointed successor. This is contrary to everything we have seen in the initial confrontation between the men and never explained in the movie at all: God, we are supposed to understand, moves in mysterious ways.
The scene at the Sistine Chapel in which Benedict chooses Bugoglio to be his successor is inadequately written. Basically, the Argentine repeatedly refuses and Benedict repeatedly insists. Bugoglio admits that he is a "divisive figure in Argentina" because of his reputation for supporting, or, at least, accommodating himself to the Junta. At 9:00 am, the army of tourists that daily invade the chapel are waiting outside and the two men withdraw into a white-walled ancient sacristy room. There, Benedict asks Bugoglio to take his confession. At this moment, the film's evasive strategy becomes clear: Benedict begins confessing his sins but, then, reaches a difficult part -- his failure to address the child-rape scandals destroying the Church's credibility. Remarkably, the director decides to protect this aspect of the old Pope's confession, imposing, as it were, the privilege of priest taking confession over the whole proceedings -- some kind of hum or buzz literally blurs the words and we can't hear what Benedict is saying. This is a startling lapse, particularly, since the privilege silencing those who take confession has been a powerful weapon in the Church's arsenal throughout the many years of litigation on this subject. It's amazing the Meirelles invokes that tool to completely evade the question of Benedict's complicity in the scandal and, more morally problematic, to similarly conceal the future Pope's feelings on that subject. From this point, the film careens sharply downward into bathos. Now, the candles release their smoke skyward. We return to the Sistine Chapel where Bugoglio is duly elected Pope. As Francis, he travels to Lampedusa in Sicily -- again, most Americans, even Catholics, will have no idea what this is about. But, in fact, Lampedusa is ground zero for the interment of African refugees taking their lives into their hands to cross the Mediterranean -- this is the center of the European refugee crisis. Again, the film evades the issue and, if you are not current on European affairs, you will wonder what this sequence is supposed to mean. Francis' speech is intercut with drone-images of huge walls in Palestine and on the American border with Mexico, images that are supposed to make the point with the cognoscenti but that will seem simply extraneous to many viewers. The refugee crisis, a major moral issue facing Europe and the World, is reduced to some shots of mountainous winter waves at sea and, then, several African tourists, apparently, craning their necks to look at the murals in the Sistine Chapel. The is the end of the film except for some wanton sentimental kitsch -- Francis teaches Benedict how to do the tango (this has been after all a kind of odd couple "Buddy Movie") and, later, we see the two men drinking wine and eating pizza while watching the World Cup game between Germany and Argentina.
The film is not without its merits. Much of the footage that seems to show us the interior of the Vatican is spectacular. The sequences in the Sistine Chapel showing the votes for Pope are vivid and full of pomp and circumstance. (I suspect that this film has as many special effects as Star Wars -- somehow, the two actors have to be integrated into vast sets that simulate the Cathedral at St. Peter and the summer palace as well as St. Peter's Square.) The film has been advertised as a sort of My Dinner with Andre, basically a well-written two actor play featuring the two Popes. But the movie is much more flamboyant (I think to its detriment): the narrative is intercut with showy flashbacks, some of them quite spectacular in their own right, documentary footage and the like. The interaction between the Popes is shot in extreme close-up -- one man talking and the other so close to the camera that his shoulder and profile are blurred. The cutting is bold: the flashbacks intervene without warning and there are shots (for instance the boulders on the Andes mountain-top) that are, at first, inexplicable. The enormous frescos in the Sistine Chapel are, often, shown in close-up, with anguished or joyous figures seeming to comment on the action. One bravura sequence shows the Sistine chapel from behind the choir's chancel screen -- the place seems dark and moldy until the camera moves back and the light suffusing the upper level of the room illumines the huge painting, now brightly renovated in vibrant blues and greens. There is lots of interesting music on the soundtrack, tangos and Clair de Lune and other things including "Blackbird" by the Beatles -- the old Pope has recorded an album at Abbey Road and, with false humility, pretends to not know who the Beatles were or that they ever made a record there. (Of course, he knows full well). The director hasn't thought through the implications of his material -- for instance, he fails to make one obvious visual connection: the victims of the Junta were tossed into the ocean and washed up on the shores of the River Plate in vast numbers. Isn't this similar to the corpses of the refugees killed by the Mediterranean and washing up on the beaches in Greece and Sicily and Lampedusa? -- it's a pretty obvious idea, but Mereilles misses the opportunity.
It seems to me that the movie stands for the proposition that the old Pope has outsmarted the Argentine Bishop. Francis is just a more relatable (to use the modern term) version of the unpleasant and dogmatic hound of Christ, Pope Benedict. It seems that he will do Benedict's bidding, that is, pretending to reform a Church that is so fundamentally corrupt that it can not be reformed. This is my cynical interpretation of the film. It's not clear to me how Mereilles, the director, perceives the film or its moral.
"The Truth may be invaluable. But without Love it is unbearable." Thus Francis quoting one of Benedict's own writings to him.
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