The Vatican is playing up the Netflix, yeah the same Netflix giving the world a Brazilian “comedy” about a “gay” Christ, Benedict bashing movie, The Two Popes:
John Waters at First Things gives us the low down:
At the level of story, it is the same old narrative we have been fed by the media from the moment of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s election as pope in 2005. He is a “dour traditionalist,” “God’s Rottweiler,” The Man Who Couldn’t Smile or Dance. In the other corner is Francis, the first non-European pope in 1,200 years, a one-time Tango club bouncer, passionate soccer fan, the “man with the common touch,” and in due course the “Christlike Pope”—in contradistinction to all his predecessors. This movie leaves idle no media cliché: Jorge Cardinal Mario Bergoglio’s battered black brogues on the airport security scanner, Francis eschewing the papal red shoes, Bergoglio watching football in a bar and eating takeaway pizza. There’s talk of the evils of walls and the virtues of bridges.
And there is worse. The movie uses clips from real news footage. One vox pop clip shows a man reacting to Benedict’s election: “I know Ratzinger. The Nazi should not have been elected.” It is a spaghetti western without guns or horses. Ratzinger/Benedict is all but fitted up with the droopy moustache: Aloof and introverted, he eats alone, prefers Latin to other languages, has never heard of ABBA, and cannot dance the Tango. Most damningly, he resists Bergoglio’s attempt to hug him. The script leaves viewers in no doubt as to which pope they are expected to side with.
Screenwriter Anthony McCarten has asserted that the film is meant to speak to a larger debate. “In a world where conservatives and progressives are very entrenched, and moving further apart if anything, and a lot of vitriol, anger flowing both ways, we wanted to make a movie about finding the middle ground.” But the movie does nothing of the kind. It simply repeats the clichés generated for many years by lazy and malevolent journalists.
The script is the offspring of McCarten’s 2017 play The Pope, in which he imagined conversations between the two men. Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of an obsessed, bad-tempered Benedict is counterposed to Jonathan Pryce’s affable, benevolent, and placid Bergoglio. If you know anything of the truth of these two men, it is almost laughable. Bergoglio is played by two actors—Pryce as the older, soon-to-become Pope Francis version; Juan Minujin as the young, earnest, idealistic, and somewhat priggish Bergoglio. Pryce pays the hale-fellow-well-met bloke that those who have met Pope Francis (as I have) may recognize.
Go here to read the rest. In short, the Pope Emeritus is given the Orange Man Bad treatment. In the face of this, of course, Pope Benedict will say nothing. A dignified, or impotent, reaction depending upon one’s point of view, but the mode of behavior that has been the hallmark of Pope Benedict in his odd “retirement”.
So they don’t have Papa Ratzi’s cats that he snuck out to visit (remember how disappointed that reporter was?), or show him with that glorious joy when he gets to explain some really fun bit of theology, and they probably don’t even mention his brother….
I doubt they will show his fondness for beer. They sure will not show the fondness of Pope Francis for chewing out subordinates behind the scenes. Anyone can get something wrong. This film gets everything wrong about these two men.
Who directed it? Leni Riefenstahl?
Sounds like it tracks quite well with the leftist imagination since 2005, and the same cohort’s grasp on uncongenial facts.
TWO POPES for the two faces of Pope Francis. Not for Benedict and Francis.