The Two Popes – 2019
I’m not Roman Catholic but the selection of the new pope commands a global audience and that most definitely includes me. With the surprise resignation of Pope Benedict XVI in February 2013, the world was held hostage for two days and four black smoke disappointments until Wednesday, March 13, 2013, driving to a morning interfaith clergy meeting, it was announced that white smoke was visible over the Vatican. U-turn. I sped home, rushed inside to click the tv on, making it just in time to see Pope Francis emerge on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica and ask the thousands of pilgrims gathered in St. Peter’s Square to pray for his predecessor, “the bishop emeritus of Rome” Pope Benedict XVI. Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected on the fifth ballot replacing Pope Benedict XVI who a month earlier announced his resignation, citing a “lack of strength of mind and body” due to his advanced age of 85, the first pope to resign on his own initiative since Celestine V in 1294. Once every 725 years equals rare. Which makes Netflix’s Two Popes a rare opportunity to create a “what if” scenario involving the two most powerful religious men in the world.
The film starts in 2005 when the death of Pope John-Paul II brought together a papal enclave which offered Cardinal Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce) and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Anthony Hopkins) a few passing opportunities to talk. Ratzinger, a humorless, Plato paraphrasing German cardinal openly campaigns for the papacy, wins on the fourth ballot and goes on to reestablish conservative priorities and reverse fledgling reform efforts within the Roman Catholic universe—diametrically opposed to humble, poverty-seeking Argentinian Bergoglio’s progressive beliefs. In 2012 the film reconvenes with Cardinal Bergoglio summoned to the Vatican ostensibly for Pope Benedict to consider Bergoglio’s desire to retire, but in reality it was for the pope to disclose his intent to resign.
The conversations between the two clerics in 2005, but mostly in 2012, are filmed with a handheld camera effect—jostling, refocusing, wiggles, close-ups, zoom-outs— to edge us bystanders into the thick of the dialogue. We are front and center to Benedict and Bergoglio’s intimate chats that are delightful, funny, playful, deeply touching, sometimes antagonistic and even angry. Bergoglio and Benedict converse on a wide range of topics from pizza to the papacy, classical music to tango, soccer to sexual predators. They debate and spar over the future of organized religion. Do doctrinal absolutes trump the epidemic of empty churches? Is sustaining an acute clergy shortage preferable to the ordination of women or married men? Is contraception the theological hill the Church will die on? Do you maintain the Church by destroying it? Do you destroy the Church by changing it? The serve and volley parley humanize both men who talk long enough to cultivate friendship, develop empathy and discover common ground despite dramatic doctrinal and political differences. Pryce and Hopkins invest every ounce of their extensive acting repertoire into two terrific performances. Jonathan Pryce is simply amazing. At Midnight Mass this Christmas Eve, when Pope Francis opened the liturgy, my immediate reaction was, “Hey, where’s the real pope?”
I know the sharing and give and take between Bergoglio and Benedict, Pryce and Hopkins was fiction, cinematic imagination, but art is the medium to explore and dream, to try on possibilities and test out alternatives. What if discourse that mirrored the two popes was our norm? Respect, appreciation, empathy. We could disagree without disliking. We could contest without confrontation. The men express how the “hardest thing is to listen to God’s voice.” On the contrary, I’d say the hardest thing is to listen to each other’s voice. My New Decade goal is to do better. Yours? I’m listening.
