#478: Getting “The Two Popes” Right

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

#453: To Honor the Dead: Pursue Peace—or Perpetual War?

I could not avoid a strong sense of irony during the week leading into Memorial Day 2016.

Last week saw President Obama’s appearance at Hiroshima, a report on US-Russia-China nuclear talks, a trade opening to Vietnam, and my personal viewing of two movies about bombing: “Children of Nagasaki” and “Eye in the Sky.”

The observation of Memorial Day itself remains full of irony, inasmuch as the original practice of the holiday promised a different message.  At first “Decoration Day” aimed only to honor the fallen Union Soldiers of the Civil War, but the actual observances soon included decorating graves of Confederate soldiers as well, even though many southern states kept a separate holiday for this purpose. Then, after World War I, the focus enlarged again to include all fallen America soldiers in any war.

The irony is that, while this history acknowledged the dead on both sides of the Civil War, no other war gets the same recognition. The assumption is that the Civil War is unique because, even though they fought for two separate countries under two different flags, the dead on both sides were Americans. In short, only American lives matter on Memorial Day. “Enemy” lives from other wars do not--nor do civilian lives (the so-called “collateral damage") that typically outnumber military deaths in modern war.

"Collateral" remains

Had Memorial Day’s focus enlarged further to remember all war dead, it might have become our national day for reflecting on the tragic loss of tens of millions of lives in wars world-wide since the Civil War. Instead, it has become a patriotic celebration in which we remember only the service of soldiers, and only US soldiers. The focus is less on the tragedy of war and more on glorifying the sacrifice of our warriors. Instead of citizens wearing poppy pins or black armbands to remember war’s fallen, we see ballplayers wearing camouflage on their baseball caps.

 But the chief irony came from President Obama himself, when he spoke at Hiroshima and called the atom bombing symbolic of the risks contained in humanity’s technological leap forward:

In the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species -- our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will -- those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction…
The wars of the modern age teach this truth.  Hiroshima teaches this truth.  Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us.  The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution, as well. 

I find this statement true, and important, but also ironic, for two reasons. 

First, because its message is nearly identical to the message delivered by Vatican Council II (1962-1965). Surveying the signs of the times to reset a vision for the future of the Catholic Church in the world, the Council called for wisdom sources to keep pace with modern technological power, to harness that power for good:

The modern world shows itself at once powerful and weak, capable of the noblest deeds or the foulest; before it lies the path to freedom or to slavery, to progress or retreat, to brotherhood or hatred…

Man judges rightly that by his intellect he surpasses the material universe, for he shares in the light of the divine mind. By relentlessly employing his talents through the ages he has indeed made progress…especially in his probing of the material world and in subjecting it to himself. Still he has always searched for more penetrating truths, and finds them...

The intellectual nature of the human person is perfected by wisdom and needs to be…

Our era needs such wisdom more than bygone ages if the discoveries made by man are to be further humanized. For the future of the world stands in peril unless wiser men are forthcoming.

So Obama’s point is well made, but more than 50 years later, and one can argue that those 50 years technological power has remained largely unchecked by wisdom, without much concern about steering that power in the right direction.

This problem is particularly acute if we talk about the role of the United States: are we helping wisdom to keep pace by promoting peace, or aiding runaway power in the form of perpetual war? Thus the second irony: the president’s good message risks contradicting many of his own administration’s policies

For example, the latest “START” deal to limit nuclear may do quite the opposite, as the New York Times recently reported:

The United States, Russia and China are now aggressively pursuing a new generation of smaller, less destructive nuclear weapons. The buildups threaten to revive a Cold War-era arms race and unsettle the balance of destructive force among nations that has kept the nuclear peace for more than a half-century.

In fact, the US is expected to "revitalize" its nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years at the cost of up to $1 trillion!

Moreover, the Times reported last week that a new Pentagon census of the US nuclear arsenal reveals that “Mr. Obama has reduced the size of the nation’s nuclear stockpile at a far slower rate than did any of his three immediate predecessors, including George Bush and George W. Bush.”

Also last week, the process of normalizing relations with Vietnam took a similar turn. President Obama announced that the US is lifting its decades-long embargo on military arms sales to Vietnam, saying: “The decision to lift the ban…was based on our desire to complete what has been a lengthy process of moving toward normalization with Vietnam.”

 This strikes me as a devil’s bargain: achieving further reconciliation with our former enemy at the cost of feeding the proliferation of arms in Southeast Asia.  But this of course promotes and extends America’s longtime role as the #1 arms dealer in the world.

None of these events mark America as a country dedicated to promoting peace.  Rather, they seem to reflect a belief in either the necessity or even the virtue of perpetual warfare.  At best this means that America is resigned to violent responses to violence around the world rather than leading us in a different direction.  At worst it means that we embrace the grip of violence because it is profitable for us.  As Pope Francis explained to schoolchildren visiting the Vatican last spring: "Many powerful people don't want peace because they live off war."

During Obama’s visit to Hiroshima, the media rehashed the old debate about the wisdom of dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities. Most mainstream media admitted that the decision remains controversial, yet implied a near-consensus that the bombings saved lives by avoiding an invasion. 

There is of course no way to resolve the dispute because there’s no way to prove an alternative history that never occurred.  But these facts are true: (1) both General MacArthur and General Eisenhower declared the bomb unnecessary; (2) the Japanese with the high command was prepared to surrender if the emperor’s role was preserved; (3) the US instead insisted on “unconditional surrender,” which was a deal breaker; (4) after surrender, the emperor was protected anyhow. Arguably, then, an invasion was not necessary, except for American stubbornness. (See: http://swaincrosscurrents.blogspot.com/2015/08/ivespent-last-week-reflecting-on-70-th.html )

But the debate about Hiroshima and Nagasaki will continue because of two distinct moral views about the use of violence.  In one view (championed by the majority of characters in the new movie “Eye in the Sky”), killing, even at the cost of innocent lives, can be justified on the speculation that such killing will save more lives.  The other view (the minority view in the movie) is that the ends do not justify the means, that one must not kill innocents even in the hope of saving other lives. 

In the first view, it is numbers that count: “The greatest good for the greatest number.” In the second view, it is intention and virtue that counts: “Do no harm,” even if one risks great sacrifice.  In the movie, these two views clash over the life of a single innocent girl.  But in real life, these two views may be the difference between policies of perpetual warfare and policies that move, however achingly, toward peace.

One “survivor” of the Nagasaki bombings (who later died of radiation sickness) wrote in 1946 about the experience of his family. His story, in its homespun, almost dull way, reflects the kind of fervent commitment to peace that has kept Japan free of nuclear weapons and strictly limited its military spending.

 But his memoirs did not appear for 20 years after World War II because the American “occupational censors” would not allow their publication. And the movie version of his “Children of Nagasaki” could not be made for 20 more years, finally appearing in 1983.  The irony here: the movie’s delay enabled the director, like the original writer a dedicated Catholic, to include footage of John-Paul II visiting Hiroshima to proclaim Catholicism’s anti-nuclear principles.

The censorship of this story, like last week’s opposition to any US apology for the bombings, reflects how the world’s most powerful nation continues to avoid acknowledging its part in the global devastation that marked most of the 20th century.  And we continue to pretend that we are not responsible for massive killings in the 21st century.

And so as Memorial Day arrives, we wave our flags and salute our soldiers and remember their service and sacrifice and feel proud of our nation.  We see little mention of the 140,000 who died at Hiroshima, the 80,000 who died in Nagasaki, the uncounted thousands who died of radiation sickness in the years that followed, the 3 million Vietnamese who died during the Vietnam War, or the 200,000 Iraqis who died following the American invasion.

We think of ourselves as the home of the free and the brave--and no doubt that is true.  But neither freedom nor bravery guarantees virtue.  And if we seek a future of peace rather than perpetual warfare, we will need a nation famous not just for its freedom, not just for its bravery, but for its goodness and moral courage.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2016

#418: “Gravity”—a Weightless Classic

A brief respite from “churchy” concerns as I reflect on a great on-screen vision.

More and more lately I’ve been surprised by the reaction of family, friends, and acquaintances who have seen Alfonso Cuaron’s film “Gravity.”  Most liked it, but their admiration was mild, and mostly overshadowed by their stronger liking for other 2013 films: Twelve Years A Slave, Dallas Buyers Club, Philomena, Blue Jasmine, Wolf Of Wall Street, Nebraska, August: Osage County, etc.  By now I’ve seen all of them and I remain convinced that, 20 years from now, Gravity will outlive them all.  And after watching Gravity a second time, I think I know why.

Mine is probably the last generation of movie-going grownups. Today’s moviegoers are mostly teens too young to access the bars, clubs, and concerts that form the core social life for people in their twenties and thirties.  In our day, movie-going remained a major and frequent “date” option well into parenthood.  But even for my generation, reactions to films tended (and still tend) to be vague: “I loved it”……“It was great”…“the best movie I’ve seen this year.”

I had the good fortune to learn about movies from Guy Leger, a French Dominican priest who taught philosophy at the Institut Catholique in Paris but also had deep personal and professional connections to French cinema.  His father owned a movie house in Bordeaux, so he grew up with film in the early 20^th century.  After serving in the French military he took his best army friend home and introduced him to the movies.  That friend was André Bazin, who became the godfather of modern film criticism, founded the preeminent film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, and inspired the French New Wave (which gave us classics like François Truffaut’s 400 Blows, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Jacques Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and Agnes Varda’s Vagabond) before his early death in 1958.

For Guy Leger, cinema was nearly a sacred art, and he demanded more probing reactions from his students than “I loved it.” And his starting point was a radical challenge to all of us.  Nearly every weekend he would repeat his creed: “If you have not been trained in cinema, you may completely miss the movie on the screen.”

At first, I was skeptical about this: how could moviegoers not see the movie in front of their eyes?  Yet over the years I have seen example after example.  Gravity is just the latest example--but it may be among the most powerful.  The more I talk to people about it, the more I think that most people went to Gravity but saw something else.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie which so powerfully combines vision, craft, grace, and even poetry.

Ironically, the trailers that showed on TV and in theaters gave the impression of a fast-moving, action-packed special effects extravaganza--and I guess many people walked out believing that’s what they had seen.

But in fact Gravity is one of the slowest movies in memory.  The first shot lasts 13 minutes, the first two shots last 18 minutes, and the first scene lasts 40 minutes of real time--nearly half of the movie’s 88 minutes! 

When was the last time you saw a 40-minute scene in a movie?  And when was there ever a scene that long that did not become claustrophobic or stage-bound (with all due respect to Hitchcock’s Rope)? I bet most viewers did not even notice that it was all one scene. I don’t know which directors in movie history could pull this off, but I am quite sure no one else alive can.

The truth is that Cuaron has mastered a long-take, slow-cutting, choreographic style that absorbs even lightning-fast action into a smooth, fluid, almost serene rhythm—which is just the effect that he needs to make this movie what it really is: an intimate, simple morality tale.

You see, that first 40 minutes concludes with Sandra Bullock, finally safe inside the womb-like confines of a space station, stripping off the protective shell of her spacesuit, floating back, and finally (in weightless super-slow motion) curling into a fetal position—and Cuaron holds that evocative image for long seconds as the scene finally ends.

Up to this point, the Bullock character has immersed herself in her science to escape from a life too traumatic to endure: she has lost her only daughter.  Unable to bear the heavy pain of her of life on earth, she chooses the remote weightlessness of the heavens. 

The second half of the movie depicts her recovery.  Facing near certain death, she retreats to her high-tech womb, incubates a new will to live, and is reborn.

A major irony is that a movie called Gravity has only one shot where the characters are not weightless--the last shot!  Of course, it is the earth-ward pull of gravity that matches the outward thrust of the space stations and keeps them in orbit--and the threatening, violent action results when one satellite’s orbit fails.  But this tension of gravity and inertia is only visible, ironically, in the weightless floating of the characters. 

The film’s visible gravity is not physical at all, so much as it is mortal and moral.  There is the grave mortal threat of the chain-reaction accident that could kill all the characters.  And there is the gravely moral matter of whether Bullock believes her own life is still worth not only living for, but fighting for.  The movie’s climax comes at the moment that her will to live overrides her death wish (thanks to George Clooney’s dream-like Deus ex Machina) and she devises a plan to get her life back.

It cannot be mere coincidence (this is fiction, after all; nothing happens by chance) that Bullock’s journey takes her from an American station to a Russian station to a Chinese station.  Her new embrace of life has no national ring to it, her rebirth is a human triumph, not a patriotic one.  Nor is it coincidence that about half the time one cannot identify what part of the earth lies below the action.  The planet below is not a place of nations; it is the home of the human family.  And Bullock finally decides to rejoin that family.

The final scene brings us back to earth amid cosmic images of rebirth and evolution.  Bullock’s space capsule plunges into water, which then rushes in when the hatch opens. The moment is urgent: she must escape her fluid-filled womb or die.

Pushing herself out of the capsule into the water herself, she begins to sink: the suit that has kept her alive in space is lethal in water, it will drag her down. So she struggles to strip down, shedding her protective “skin” for a second time--just as a large frog swims by her up to the surface. 

Like a fellow amphibian who finally needs fresh air to breathe, she struggles to the surface--and floats, not quite weightless but buoyant.  She first swims and then crawls to the water’s edge, ready to emerge from water to land.  And in this, the movie’s last shot, she finally feels the pull of gravity that has been missing since the opening shot--the pull that has brought her back to earth and back to life. 

She nearly collapses under the new-felt, unfamiliar weight of her own body, her fists digging into the primal muck as if she were the planet’s first land-creature--as if her rebirth is the space-age rebirth of humanity. 

Finally, she makes it to her feet and begins walking, unsteady, over the land. We can see the change in her body language: Now she feels the whole weight of the world on her shoulders--and now she can bear it. She has decided that, after all, she prefers the heaviness on life on earth to weightlessness in the heavens. No longer gripped by grief, she gratefully welcomes gravity.

This is an instant classic whose astonishing special effects, stunning visual beauty and masterful camerawork are all eclipsed by its lyrical (and nearly mystical) affirmation of life and the courage it takes to live it.

  © Bernard  F. Swain PhD 2014