THE FOUR POPES ⭐️⭐️

THE FOUR POPES

By Armen Pandola

Movies can re-make reality. Who can separate the real Winston Churchill, an arch-conservative who hated even the idea of freedom for India or Ireland from the many fictional film Churchills who fought for freedom against its greatest foe in modern times? In America, we have the real President Kennedy whose first term as President was a disaster contrasted with the golden boy/man of film and fiction.

Today, every famous character has a dual personality - one that exists in the real world and one that exists in the ether, that place where all is born of the human imagination.

And so with Netflix's The Two Popes, directed by Fernando Meirelles and written by Anthony McCarten from his own play. The story pits conservative former Pope Benedict XVI against progressive current Pope Francis I, formerly Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (like Super Bowls, Popes are enumerated by the eternal roman numerals of a bygone empire - for those who did not have to endure Latin classes, it's Benedict the 16th and Francis the 1st). There is a real and imagined Pope Benedict and Pope Francis - so we have four popes.

The dramatic force of this movie is Cardinal Bergoglio's desire to retire during the papacy of Benedict. This is ironic since, eventually, Benedict 'retires' from the papacy, something that no pope has done in over seven hundred years. And while Benedict had nothing to do with the election of Francis as his successor, it is implied that he resigned so that Francis could become pope.

Francis travels from his home in Bueno Aires, Argentina to Rome to get permission from the Pope to retire. From the beginning, McCarten ignores facts to make dramatic points - Bergoglio did not need the Pope's permission to retire. There has been much criticism of this movie based on its ignoring of many facts to heighten the drama, but, in the end, the movie works as a drama or it is nothing so it is hard to blame McCarten for taking liberties.

At its heart, this is a buddy movie, pairing two very dissimilar people together to make dramatic hay from the combination. The original popular buddy story is The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas père. Buddy movies have been around since Chaplin's The Kid and many have been super hits like Casablanca, Butch Cassidy, Midnight Run, 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon, The Sting, The Shawshank Redemption, etc.

Simply put, Pope Benedict thinks the Catholic Church's problems have been caused by too much compromise with the modern world and Francis believes the problems are caused by the Church's refusal to enter the 20th let alone the 21st century. Whatever the cause, the Church has been in decline for decades and the reasons are many. This movie reflects the debate about the causes: some, for example, believe it is caused by too much liberalism and others by too little.

So how does The Two Popes keep from becoming a kind of long, boring Firing Line? Two reasons, Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce. They play Benedict and Francis and bring whatever life there is to the story. While Benedict's past as a member of the Nazi Youth in his native Germany (he was forced to do this) is not given much play, Francis' story is told in flashback, showing him about to be engaged to marry, then deciding against it when he 'receives a message from god.' Francis is the first Jesuit priest to become pope - Jesuits are specially trained and it takes many more years of education than a regular priest. He becomes head of the Jesuit order in Argentina and gets cozy with the military junta that overthrew the democratically elected government and killed or tortured tens of thousands who opposed its reign. Of course, his past is whitewashed in the movie - he tells Benedict that he could never become pope because he could never forgive himself. Benedict tells him that only God is perfect, and that seems to change his mind - so much for his eternal regret at what he did.

Benedict tells Francis about his own sins - he knew that certain priests were abusing boys and did nothing about it. While the actual reason for Benedict retiring as pope is not stated in this movie, it is suggested that it as atonement for his sin in allowing this to continue.

Is this movie worth watching? Lots of critics think so based on the performances of the two leads. In the end, it is a disappointment. It doesn't take itself seriously enough to be honest about its two main characters who have gotten to be popes, in part, because of their past concessions to the powerful who rule the Church and the world in which the church must exist. Every day, the Church becomes less and less relevant to our world and no amount of pious speeches by popes is going to change that. Even a fictional character like Pope Francis in this movie is not enough of a follower of Christ to do his work:

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

 Matthew 21:12–13