 |
| Shia LaBeouf in Padre Pio |
Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Cristina Chiriac, Marco Leonardi, Asia Argento, Vincenzo Crea, Luca Lionello, Salvatore Ruocco, Brando Pacitto, Stella Mastrantonio, Federico Majorana, Michelangelo Dalisi. Screenplay: Maurizio Braucci, Abel Ferrara. Cinematography: Alessandro Abate. Production design: Tommaso Ortino. Film editing: Leonado Daniel Bianchi. Music: Joe Delia.
Although Shia LaBeouf said that he became a devout Christian while making Abel Ferrara's Padre Pio, his performance is one of the worst things about a misfired film. Now officially Saint Pio of Pietrelcina after his canonization by Pope John Paul II in 2002, the Capuchin friar played by LaBeouf lends his name to a film that's not very much about him. Most of Padre Pio, and certainly the more interesting part, deals with the conflict in the village of San Giovanni Rotondo between socialists and the landowners who became part of the emerging National Fascist Party, culminating in a massacre following an election that went against the landowners in 1920. Ferrara stages the scenes that culminate in the massacre well, beginning with the arrival in the village of the men who had served in World War I, and continuing with the exploitation of farmworkers by the landowners, some of whom had fought side by side in the war. But the depiction of Padre Pio's spiritual torment, including a literal fight with the devil and his receiving the stigmata at the film's end, feels cooked up in comparison with the realistic depiction of the political conflict. LaBeouf's American accent also clashes distractingly with the accents of the Italian actors who surround him. Ferrara stunt-casts Asia Argento as a man who confesses his incestuous desire for his daughter to the friar. The gender switch of the casting only adds to the film's general incoherence.
