Fernando Meirelles (2019)

The Two Popes ends with Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI, his immediate predecessor, watching the 2014 World Cup final on television together.  This makes amusing sense.  The drama of the preceding two hours has depended heavily on the opposing worldviews of conservative Benedict (Anthony Hopkins) and relatively progressive Francis (Jonathan Pryce) and, in spite of this, their growing friendship.  The two sides in the final are those of their native lands, Germany and Argentina respectively.  (One of the many differences between the popes is that Francis is a true soccer enthusiast/nationalist:  his anguish, when Mario Götze scores the only goal of the final, deep into extra time, is real.)  The football finale is inadvertently apt too.  As well as being the story of two pontiffs, this is a film of two halves.

The more substantial part of The Two Popes is a series of conversations between the title characters, adapted by Anthony McCarten from his 2017 stage play (called The Pope).  Since his good script for The Theory of Everything, McCarten has written two poor screenplays (Darkest Hour and Bohemian Rhapsody) but his dialogue for this new film is a considerable achievement.  For the most part, these speculative exchanges skilfully blend insights into the protagonists’ personalities with expressions of their views about God and the future of the Church.  The film’s less substantial part is the one straining to be a dynamic motion picture, as distinct from the physically static talkfest it essentially is.

The director, Fernando Meirelles, is still best known for City of God (2002), a piece of cinema so frenetic in the early stages that I quickly tired of watching it on DVD and resolved to return when I was feeling stronger.  I haven’t felt stronger yet.  In the meantime, I’ve seen, without thinking much of, The Constant Gardener (2005) and 360 (2011), two of the four features Meirelles has made since City of God.   A Vatican conclave doesn’t offer the same scope for hyperactive camerawork as favela crime in Rio de Janeiro but Meirelles does his best at the start of The Two Popes to inject visual excitement into the election of a new pope in 2005.  The restless camera is, in the circumstances, rather comical, and seems unnecessary.  The election process is intrinsically interesting, despite our knowing its outcome – that Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger became the 265^th pope and took the papal name Benedict XVI.

According to the BBC news website in early 2013, the occasion of the most recent papal conclave:

‘At the end of the election, a document is drawn up giving the results of the voting at each session, and handed over to the new pope.  It is kept in an archive in a sealed envelope, which can be opened only on the orders of the pope.’

This secrecy doesn’t prevent media stories ‘revealing’ the results of each round of voting and the film’s version of the votes cast in the first round in 2005 reflects the details available on Wikipedia.  These claim that Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was Ratzinger’s closest election rival.  Seven years later, Bergoglio travels to Rome with a view to tendering his resignation as a a cardinal.  Summoned to the papal summer residence of Castel Gandolfo, he’s dismayed to learn there that, and why, the Pope won’t accept his resignation.  Benedict XVI is himself planning to step down.  Although he doesn’t share the Argentine’s commitment to liberation theology and greater social justice, he believes Bergoglio is the man to step into his red papal slippers.  (When the time comes, his successor, a man with his feet on the ground, prefers to retain his own shoes.)

The narrative has already included a few short flashbacks to the younger Bergoglio (Juan Minujín) and now focuses on his past more fully – in particular, his time as head of Argentina’s Jesuits  in the 1970s and relations with the junta that seized power in 1976.  Bergoglio still feels remorse for what he sees as his failure to stand up against the military regime and the consequences of this for other, more oppositional fellow priests.  Fernando Meirelles is probably relieved to inject this action into The Two Popes but the 1970s sequences are weak beside the verbal exchanges in Rome.  The extended flashbacks take the film into more conventional biopic territory and feel like the padding they are.  This is also the one clumsy part of McCarten’s writing, as Benedict’s voiceover summarises parts of Bergoglio’s CV for the latter’s benefit.  He must already knows the details but the film-makers need to make sure their audience does too.

The Two Popes is better when the principals are engaged in serious debate, allowing Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce to fly vocally and strike sparks off each other.  It’s also better, more surprisingly, when Meirelles and McCarten use humour to humanise the men of God.  This might have been gruesome but it’s often funny or, at least, agreeably instructive.  During the 2005 conclave, Ratzinger and Bergoglio are in the rest room at the same time, washing their hands at adjacent basins.  Ratzinger asks what hymn tune it was he just heard Bergoglio whistling.  The answer is Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’; Ratzinger likes the sound of that – of Abba, that is, thanks to the word’s biblical connotations.  About to take his leave after their 2012 meeting, Bergoglio gives Benedict an impromptu tango lesson, despite light-hearted protests – a nice visualisation of  the takes-two-to-tango import of their dialogues.  (The current pope really is a lifelong tango fan.)  Benedict is well aware that, as a German pontiff, he’s doubly qualified to be humourless.  He’s no less aware that his surname has helped get him the nickname ‘God’s rottweiler’ (‘They think I don’t know, but I do …’).

Even a sequence where the pair send one of the Vatican staff out for pizza and two cans of Fanta works well.  When the meal arrives, Benedict insists on saying grace, at length:  for his companion, starting on the fast food is a distressingly slow process.  The capper is that, once grace is over with, it’s Benedict who gets his teeth into the pizza with a greedy disregard for table manners.  Anthony Hopkins’s avidity here is somehow one of his most striking illustrations of his character’s great age.  Ratzinger was, at seventy-eight, the oldest new pope in approaching three hundred years.  He resigned the papacy on the grounds of deteriorating strength to cope with the physical and mental demands of the job.  Hopkins, himself coming up eighty-two, vividly transmits Ratzinger’s continuous struggle to suppress weariness.  The actor’s intent eyes and vocal precision convey the sense of an enduringly sharp mind defying physical frailty.  (The images of the real man, in a clip of news film of him and Bergoglio inserted at the end, give a similar impression.)

A scene in which Benedict insists on Bergoglio’s hearing his confession starts well but culminates in Fernando Meirelles’s worst misjudgment.  In another pleasing touch of geriatric humour, the Pope says he tends to forget his minor sins nowadays.  His confessor is astonished and not unhappy to hear that this, according to Benedict, isn’t a sin in itself.  ‘That’s useful to know,’ says Bergoglio, noting it for his own future reference.   The confession then moves on, though, to sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, a thorn in the side of Benedict’s papacy (and that of his successor) – specifically, the controversy surrounding the Mexican priest Father Marcial Maciel Delgado, founder of the Legion of Christ.  What Benedict has to say causes Bergoglio to raise his voice but Meirelles then blurs the sound so we can’t make out the words of either man.  Next, he moves the camera outside the room, to face its closed doors.  That second device, on its own, would be enough to make the point albeit obviously.  In combination with the blurred voices, it amounts to overkill – an especially egregious instance of the director’s taste for ‘cinematic’ gimmick.  The obscured conversation and lack of any residue to it in The Two Popes are themselves a sin of omission:  the film, too, having raised the sex abuse issue, fails to address it.

Benedict XVI’s voluntary resignation as pope wasn’t unprecedented:  as he reminds Bergoglio, Celestine V did the same in 1294.  The narrative moves through his resignation speech (delivered in Latin), to the March 2013 conclave and the election of Bergoglio.  His first action as pope is to do something no other pontiff in history has done.  He phones his predecessor.  (There’s no reply:  Ratzinger is concentrating on the television coverage of events in Rome.)  This is the strongest element of the relatively brief coverage of Francis’s papacy, which includes a perfunctory montage of his globetrotting highlights to date.  The film’s prologue features the voice of Francis, on the phone to Skytours, trying to book himself a flight to Lampedusa:  when he gives his name and his postcode as Vatican City, the voice at the end of the line dismisses the call as a practical joke.  Meirelles repeats this bit within the main action.  Francis then emerges from his office and, with some reluctance, asks one of the Swiss Guard if he can sort out the booking instead.

In other words, the script and direction tend to overdo their emphasis on the present pope’s humility yet Jonathan Pryce gives a perfectly judged performance – he’s quietly witty, emotionally fine-tuned, physically convincing.   It’s a real pleasure to see Pryce thrive in a role that gives him so much more scope than the one he was saddled with in The Wife last year.  Neither he nor Anthony Hopkins is formally religious:  their empathy with the men they’re playing, and complete avoidance of the temptation to satirise them, makes their work here all the more admirable.  This is, to all intents and purposes, a two-hander and Juan Minujín, in the otiose flashbacks to Bergoglio’s early middle age, has the added disadvantage of facial features very different from Pryce’s.  Minujín does have a couple of extraordinary moments, though, when his expression and the movement of his head seem exactly like the older man’s.

There’s a resonance between the clash of traditionalist and more progressive outlooks at the centre of The Two Popes and the fact that it’s a Netflix offering.  Although there were a dozen premieres of Netflix-distributed feature film dramas in the last quarter of 2018, attention was focused almost exclusively on Roma.  (We’ll never know if its Netflix connections or its non-English dialogue was the deciding factor in Academy voters’ decision to give the year’s Best Picture Oscar to Green Book rather than to Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece.)  Just twelve months on, it seems half the high-profile features opening in cinemas are destined for a short-lived theatrical release prior to Netflix streaming – The Laundromat, Dolemite Is My Name, The King, The Irishman, Marriage Story, now The Two Popes.  The Aeronauts and The Report are already streaming on Amazon Prime Video.  ‘I disagree with everything you think, say and do.  But I think your time has come, Bergoglio,’ Pope Benedict tells the man who will succeed him in the Vatican.   Old-school cinema-goers can’t help muttering similar sentiments in the direction of the streaming service giants.

5 December 2019