It was with 2002’s City of God that director Fernando Meirelles first burst onto the international movie scene. A South American Goodfellas, the film followed a young Brazilian boy named Rocket across three decades as he scraped out an existence in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. The movie met roaring success and is now perennially regarded as one of the better movies of all time (#22 and #40 on IMDB and Letterboxd’s Top 250, respectively). Behind the captivating narrative, the uncomfortable depictions of violence and poverty, and the heavy-handed approach to editing and camera effects that would probably knock Robert W. Paul out cold, stood Meirelles. His contribution to the gangster genre was unique and revolutionary and spectacular. As a result, few filmgoers of the early noughties would’ve believed that Meirelles would end the next decade with a Netflix-funded biopic about Pope Benedict XVI and his Argentine successor. For one, Netflix was still only renting out DVDs at that time. For another, neither pope had yet been elected. However, such was exactly the path that the Brazilian director followed. Unfortunately, The Two Popes proves that Meirelles would do better to stick with gangster flicks.
Popes is shot to look like a documentary, covering the eight years between German conservative Joseph Ratzinger’s election to the papacy, and his bizarre resignation and the subsequent election of Argentine (and much less conservative) Jorge Bergoglio in 2013. The film is comprised in large part of conversations between the two during the former’s papal rule. To the casting director’s credit, those conversations are acted out brilliantly. Jonathon Pryce and Anthony Hopkins, playing brothers in faith but rivals in thought, are the lifeblood of a picture whose success is first and foremost determined by its ability to keep audiences engaged in the religious parleys of two elderly gentlemen. The two actors dance masterfully about the topics of life and death and what lies beyond, then turn on a dime and discuss the Beatles and pulp detective TV shows with equal precision. Were either to bring in a major award for their performance, it would not be an upset. It is not there that the film falters.
Instead, fault is found in the way that the two Popes are shot and presented. To begin, Meirelles’ cinematography leads one to believe that he is unsure of the genre he is working with. Crash zooms, extreme close-ups, and Dutch angles aplenty ultimately distract the audiences from the interesting discussions they ought to be paying attention to. At the same time, the film’s structure is constructed such that the narrative climaxes in a 20-minute flashback that feels more like a digression than a revelation. The music cues are odd, if not unwelcome, and the informal nature that pervades much of the film quietly removes the possibility that the weight of its emotional summits will linger long past the end credits.
At the risk of raising pointless hypotheticals, one cannot help but wonder how other directors may have approached the task. Indeed, brief moments of the film are so beautifully interwoven with the tremendous power of religious themes that the potential of the film flashes in one’s face like neon signage. As quickly as those moments appear, however, they dissolve again in the presence of yet another Dutch angle. Ultimately, the story is acted out well, filmed poorly, and structured clumsily, but does not fail to move the audience at least once or twice.
3/5 STARS
