The Two Popes review: Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce buddy up in a cuddly papal PR exercise
Dir: Fernando Meirelles. Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Jonathan Pryce, Juan Minujín. 12A cert, 126 mins
It’s easy to relish Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce chewing the fat as Vatican rivals in The Two Popes. Too easy. A relaxed, playful Hopkins is Pope Benedict XVI, who in 2013 became the first man in 600 years to resign from the papacy, aged 85, handing the reins to his liberal successor Pope Francis (Pryce).
Borrowing some tricks from The Queen and Frost/Nixon, this troublingly shallow film is written by the none-too-reliable Anthony McCarten (The Darkest Hour, Bohemian Rhapsody), and directed by Fernando (City of God) Meirelles as a lazy mélange of news footage, stately two-hander and mismanaged period flashbacks.
It presents the papal handover as a negotiation in stages, starting with the unexpected summons for Francis (or Cardinal Bergoglio, as he was then known) to visit Pope Benedict at his country retreat.
The sight of Pryce stopping off by a roadside café to don his proper vestments gets a chuckle, and the film is full of these scattered amusements, like Hopkins guzzling pizza and obeying a Fitbit. All this cuddly, pope-com bromance stuff might sound very cute, but thanks to some fairly grotesque evasions at the centre, it comes off like fiddling while Rome burns.
The pair’s first encounter does not go well: on every topic from homosexuality to Vatican finances, they’re at loggerheads, and it seems inconceivable that Benedict, branded a Nazi by his foes, might be grooming a successor in the shape of this dogma-averse Argentinian so-and-so.
Such is the case – but only after both men, reunited months later at the Vatican, have offloaded dark confessions to each other. For Bergoglio, this is the taint of his involvement in 1976’s violent military junta, which has made him hugely divisive in his country. The flashbacks to this scary epoch, where he’s played as a troubled go-between by Juan Minujín, ask us to consider the bleeding conscience of a man who in real life has shut any such questions down.
The film has an even poorer strategy for dramatising what Benedict knew about priests' sex crimes. He asks Bergoglio to take his confession, and when he starts to whisper about a particular case, the film kills the sound and shuts the door on us. Especially after the fieriest recent film on this subject, Fran?ois Ozon’s By the Grace of God, having curtains swished across the whole issue is troublesome in the extreme.
An exercise in bonding through mutual exculpation, it’s worryingly close to being great PR. The actors are blameless, just as the set design – including a complete recreation of the Sistine Chapel – isn’t the problem.
Pryce works hard with what he’s got: he might have excelled with another script. Was Benedict just dumping all the Church’s problems in Bergoglio’s lap? And what’s it like to have a Pope Emeritus skulking about in the Vatican’s corridors, judging your every move? There's a film, maybe. Alas, this one has already thrown in the towel – the duo are last seen settling in for Germany-Argentina’s 2014 World Cup final, popping beers on a sofa while jaunty music swells. So we really have no idea.
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