The Two Popes (Meirelles, 2019)
There’s no “new releases” update today as I have a rare gig filling in on RNZ At the Movies tomorrow and I don’t want to write those reviews twice! Listen out at 7.30 tomorrow evening as I talk about Sinners, Warfare and Small Things Like These.
In the meantime, here’s a topical recommendation.
When I reviewed Conclave for RNZ earlier this year, I introduced it with these paragraphs about my other favourite Pope films:
Despite my lack of a personal relationship with Catholicism, I do love a good Pope film and I’ve been very lucky in recent years to have had plenty of good ones to enjoy.
In 2019 we had Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins in The Two Popes, a fictionalised story of the handover between Benedict XVI and Pope Francis and – I think – Anthony McCarten’s best screenplay.
The most fun fictional Pope has to be Jude Law in Paolo Sorrentino’s 2016 series The Young Pope in which a handsome and charismatic New York cardinal is elected as a compromise candidate but then proceeds to challenge every Vatican assumption and threaten the heart of the establishment. He ended that series in a mysterious coma, replaced by the glorious John Malkovich. Seek it out, if you can. It’s delicious.
But the Pope film that came to mind while I was watching Edward Berger’s Conclave, was Habemus Papam, or We Have a Pope from 2011.
In Nanni Moretti’s sly comedy, Michel Piccoli plays another compromise candidate, a cardinal who doesn’t want the job and tries to deal with his panic with the help of a psychoanalyst.
In memory of Pope Francis, I want to single out The Two Popes mainly because of the compassion and empathy the film has for two very real people who share an entirely unreal world. Jonathan Pryce’s portrayal of Pope Francis was so uncanny that ever since, whenever I saw a photo of Francis, I thought of him as Pope Jonathan.
McCarten’s script is about an imagined meeting between the ageing Pope Benedict (Anthony Hopkins) and the frustrated reformer, Cardinal Bergoglio of Argentina (Jonathan Pryce). Benedict is feeling his age and feeling something else too – or the lack of something. Bergoglio think he is visiting so he can resign but in fact he being sounded out as a possible replacement. Benedict is considering becoming the first pope to resign since Gregory XII in 1415. That’s not a huge amount of precedent for an institution that relies so much on tradition.
You can see why it would have made a terrific play – at least as long as it was cast as well as this film is. Two characters with much in common but also much that separates them. Conservative and reformer, European and Latin American, detached and worldly. But both desperate in their own way to do the right thing by the church and 1.2 billion Roman Catholics.
Films like this are so rare. Films that hinge on the goodness of characters rather than their desires. It doesn’t ignore their flaws – imagined though they may be in their detail – but it felt invigorating to spend time with these two old geezers.
Thinking about screenwriter Anthony McCarten (multiple Oscar-nominee for Darkest Hour, The Theory of Everything and The Two Popes), I am prompted to recall that in his early days as a Wellington playwright, I produced two of his plays: Mazurka (1994) and the Tim Balme one-man show Let’s Spend the Night Together (1993) which we toured to Dunedin and Auckland, necessitating several long car rides together up and down the country.
I bring this up not to name-drop (or at least not just to name-drop), but to recall what a weird adventure this thing I call a career has been. That experience helped shape me but no longer appears on my cv.
Finally, on the subject of my cv, a contract I was looking forward to has been delayed for another three months which means there is a gap in my schedule. If you know of anything – contract or permanent – you know where to find me. Upgrading from free to a paid subscription would come in handy now, too!
Where to watch The Two Popes
Worldwide: Streaming on Netflix
