By all means see the Netflix
film “The Two Popes,”
---but see it for the wonderful thing it really is.
George Weigel takes pride
presenting himself as someone who has known several popes, so he rightly claims
to be “credentialed” for inside insight into recent papal history.
But a film critic he is not.
And even professional critics
sometimes make the mistake he commits in his review of the movie “the Two Popes,”
criticizing a film for what it is NOT rather than analyzing what it IS. Sadly,
this leaves Weigel—and others like him—unable to appreciate the film before his
eyes. He saw “baloney on steroids,” and missed what was actually on the screen:
a delightfully plausible parable aimed at inspiring the viewer.
Weigel begins by saying the film
claims to be “based on actual facts.” This is not true. The screen title at the
movie's start reads “Inspired by true events”—which is an entirely different matter.
Both the screenwriter and the director have explained that they wanted to make
the movie because of their admiration for Pope Francis, combined with being intrigued
by the events surrounding the resignation of Benedict XVI. They asked themselves: “What if these two were
to arrange something together?”
Weigel says the movie reveals
more about the screenwriter and the director than about the historical figures.
Well, duh—the whole point of film art
is to express the creators’ vision. Weigel makes the common mistake of testing
a film about historical figures for its historical accuracy. But this is not a documentary,
or even a docudrama.
Could anyone really think
that images of the College of Cardinals entering the conclave to the tune of
Abba’s “Dancing Queen” could be about documenting events? Or that setting
Benedict’s announcement of resignation to three different versions of the
Beatles’ tune “Blackbird” aimed to serve historical accuracy?
The Filmmakers are exercising
what is generally referred to as “artistic license”; typically they care less about
veracity and more about verisimilitude. Yet they land on some verities.
So they contrive a two-day
meeting in which both men change by coming to terms with their differences. My personal reaction: I left feeling, “Wouldn’t it be
wonderful if this had happened—and even better if such things happened more
often!” I took it as a parable for our time, a time in which people of differing
views –in our Church, in our communities, in our nation, in our world--have stopped
listening to each other. Imagine the Church as a public model inspiring people
to resolve their differences!
Weigel is entitled to consider
the film’s characters as “stick-figures,” despite the screenplay being nominated
for both a Golden Globe and an Oscar. But his comparison of “one–dimensional portrayals
of popes” with Xavier Rynne’s New Yorker
coverage of Vatican Council II is a
simple category mistake—the proverbial “apples and oranges.” While Rynne
claimed to be reporting, these filmmakers openly admit to inventing. One can
search numerous sites detailing what is historical and what is apocryphal in
the film.
Still, the characters' positions
on issues are consistent with the public record. Weigel complains that the film
misrepresents Benedict’s attachment to the papacy, quoting him that “I am not a
man of governance.” And while it is true the film shows him urging cardinals to
support him at the conclave in 2005, it also has him arguing for his own
resignation by saying “I’m a scholar, not a manager.”
And while Weigel sees “self-knowledge,
spiritual detachment, and churchmanship” in Benedict, he ignores how the film portrays
precisely those qualities, thus humanizing a figure who has too often been
stereotyped in the media as an ogre. Weigel writes as if the film were a hatchet
job on Benedict. But every single viewer I’ve spoken with has come away finding
Benedict a much warmer, more admirable character.
Weigel complains that the movie
portrays the 2013 election of Francis as fueled by a desire for a reform
movement, a course change from John-Paul II and Benedict back to engagement with
the world. What motivated the voters is hard to prove, but there is ample evidence
from Francis’ own public statements that he
himself took his election as a mandate to make changes in the Church’s
approach to the world—and that he took much of his inspiration from the two
popes who preceded John-Paul II and Benedict:
Vatican II, inspired by Pope Paul VI and
John, decided to look to the future with a modern spirit and to be open to
modern culture. The Council Fathers knew that being open to modern culture
meant religious ecumenism and dialogue with non-believers. But afterwards very
little was done in that direction. I have the humility and ambition to want to
do something.
Weigel further argues that
the real motive behind Francis’ election was to choose “a tough minded, no-nonsense
reformer who would quickly and decisively clean house"--that is, the
Vatican itself, especially the curia. He implies the movie ignores this.
He seems to have missed the
scenes when Benedict complains about the curia, pleads his inability to fix
things (“I have lost,” he says) or when Cardinal Bergoglio (later Pope Francis)
recounts how he had already cleaned up his ecclesiastical house in Argentina.
When he expresses his intent to do the same in Rome, Benedict says "Well,
good luck with that!"
Sadly, Weigel simply ignores
a large part of the movie showing Bergoglio's own path to the priesthood, as
well as his struggles as a leader. But viewers who saw the Oscar-winning films
“City of God” and “The Constant Gardener” will recognize in these flashback scenes
the world-engaging imagery of director Fernando Meirelles, full of vibrant
third-world street scenes and the chaos of poor people’s lives. These scenes reveal
that what inspired Meirelles to make this new film was precisely Francis’
career-long engagement with struggling people.
Finally Weigel calls the movie
“fake news” and states his desire to “clarify the historical record.” But people
who react to this movie as if it were (or claimed to be) a historical record of
what actually happened have already failed to see the film on the screen. They
just don’t get it. It’s their loss.
Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention
the one point on which Weigel and I agree: the film is quite funny! In fact, several
critics have called it a “buddy comedy”—and they are closer to the truth than
Weigel.
The closing scene of the two
popes watching the 2014 Argentina-Germany World Cup Final together may well be
apocryphal, like most of the film—but the accompanying documentary footage of
the Two Popes warmly embracing is not. When you see “the Two Pope” on Netflix,
take it for what it really is: a hopeful fiction of how powerful but opposed
leaders might come to see each other as (to quote Benedict's character) “only
human”-- and even to become friends.
© Bernard
F. Swain PhD 2020
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