The Two Popes (2019)
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The Two Popes Movie Review
The Two Popes is a 2019 biopic directed by Fernando Meirelles and starring Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce. It’s a very disappointing movie.
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“When no one is to blame,
everyone is to blame“
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Behind the Vatican walls, Pope Benedict and the future Pope Francis must find common ground to forge a new path for the Catholic Church. Needless to say, this premise sounded excellent, but the execution is so bad that the end product really disappointed me.
I expected a movie filled with interesting conversations throughout its entire runtime. What I got, however, was a film that frustratingly refused to acknowledge most of its themes properly. The first act is so good, actually, that everything that came afterward was even a bigger letdown.
It started off with interesting discussions about progressivism versus conservatism within Catholicism, but afterwards it succumbed to much less interesting conversations with only the final discussion between the two about faith and their troubled past being even remotely interesting.
The biggest problem lies in the film’s flashbacks which are super unnecessary, and very oddly put together. The pacing in the movie is totally off, frankly very bad and the structure is terrible. Most of the second half was filled with way too many flashbacks, mostly in Argentina, and I simply found those not all that interesting for this story. It made the movie very clichéd, and very obvious.
But the performances are both very strong of course. Anthony Hopkins is excellent as Pope Benedict, and Hopkins has rarely been better in recent times. Thankfully, he finally got a role worthy of his talents, and hopefully he will return to such roles in the future as well.
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But honestly, Jonathan Pryce stole the show from the great Hopkins by physically resembling Pope Francis eerily so, and generally being very believable in his role, and acting out his emotional moments superbly.
Both are excellent, The Two Popes is also very interesting and epic in its usage of so many different languages, and it does inform the viewer about this event in 2013, and how important it was for this religion. I just wish it were more sophisticated.
The Two Popes’ refusal to tackle its more important, more thought-provoking themes proved to be immensely frustrating as a viewing experience. It has some great conversations, but for the majority of its runtime, the picture resorted to less interesting, not all that believable conversations, and an unfortunate emphasis on oddly put together flashback scenes. Anthony Hopkins and especially Jonathan Pryce are excellent, though.
