A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, February 6, 2020

The Two Popes (Fernando Meirelles, 2019)

Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce in The Two Popes
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Jonathan Pryce, Juan Minujin, Luis Gnecco, Cristina Banegas, María Ucedo, Renato Scarpa, Sidney Cole, Achille Brugnini. Screenplay: Anthony McCarten. Cinematography: César Charlone. Production design: Mark Tildesley. Film editing: Fernando Stutz. Music: Bryce Dessner.

Shall I admit that there are two establishments I find utterly useless: the British royal family and the papacy? But that both somehow never fail to grab my interest whenever their internal workings are exposed to view, as in the TV series The Crown and Paolo Sorrentino's The Young Pope and its sequel, The New Pope. Fernando Meirelles's The Two Popes has some of the juicy insiderness of those series, but it feels hamstrung a bit by the fact that the relationship between Benedict XVI and Francis is an ongoing story. At the end of the film, Benedict and Francis have achieved a kind of rapprochement, but news stories since the movie's release have suggested there's a lot of continuing tension between the two. Where The Two Popes works best is in its portrait of the younger Francis's life in Argentina, in which Juan Minujin takes over the role from the Oscar-nominated Jonathan Pryce. I would have liked a corresponding treatment of the more controversial past of Joseph Ratzinger, the young Benedict, but that might have steered the film, already more than two hours long, in the direction of a miniseries. Anthony Hopkins also received an Oscar nomination (as supporting actor, though he receives top billing) for his performance as Benedict, and he manages to capture some of the narrow-eyed conservatism of that pope, which just left me wanting more.

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