religion

CONCLAVE: explosive secrets? in the Vatican?

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Photo caption: Ralph Fiennes (front) in CONCLAVE. Courtesy of Focus Features.

In the satisfying thriller Conclave, the pope dies and all the cardinals gather in the Vatican to elect a new pope. Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) has the responsibility for organizing and presiding over the election.

Cardinals may be princes of the Church, but they arrive like other business travelers; they’re towing their rolling luggage, obligingly going through the metal detector and huddling outdoors for a quick last smoke. They are put up in surprisingly spare Vatican rooms (far less adorned than a suite in a Courtyard by Marriott). The nun who is the pope’s household manager (Isabella Rossellini) imports a battalion of nuns to cook for and serve the cardinals.

Lawrence has to keep pivoting as weird things begin to happen. There’s a rumored secret report that no one can find. A noisy midnight fracas erupts in one of the cardinals’ rooms. There’s a earthquake-like rumbling noise outside. And a cardinal arrives who no one had known about, having been secretly appointed by the late pope.

Now can you call a movie with septuagenarians padding about in embroidered robes a “thriller”? You bet. Plot twists fall like dominoes, all the way up to an absolutely unpredictable gobsmack of an ending. Conclave’s screenplay was adapted from Robert Harris’ novel.

Of course, this setting is perfect for conspiracies and cover-ups. The Vatican has been mastering clandestine intrigue for over a millennium.

The story is perfectly paced by director Edward Berger, whose last film, All Quiet on the Western Front, was nominated for nine Oscars and won four. Conclave, too, is award-worthy – Berger fills the screen with stunning images: the white-mitred cardinals listening to a homily, the cardinals in their richly red robes arrayed behind tables in the Sistine Chapel, and a flock of white umbrellas being carried across a Vatican plaza.

The cast is first-rate, led by Fiennes, whom The Wife pointed out is in every scene. His Lawrence is a product of more liberal modern times, yet pragmatic about what changes are possible in the hidebound institution. Lawrence loyally carries our his duties to the Church while undergoing his own internal crisis of faith.

Isabella Rossellini’s nun is formidably fierce and tightly restrained (until she isn’t). Stanley Tucci is excellent as a respected idealogue who strains to cover up his own brittleness. John Lithgow, as one of the most ambitious cardinals, exudes oleaginous sanctimoniousness. Lucian Msamati projects the jolly confidence of a man who expects to become the first African pope. I especially admired Sergio Castellitto’s performance as a reactionary papal candidate; the character could easily have been portrayed as a cartoonish villain, but Castellitto’s unrelenting charm offensive and his gregarious energy make him a credible challenger to the others.

The newly discovered cardinal is played by Carlos Diehz in his first feature film. Diehz emanates a profound, magnetic sincerity. There is no movie here without Diehz’ quiet gravitas.

Conclave is the first big Oscar-bait movie of the 2024 Holiday season, and it will earn both popularity and prestige.

BETWEEN THE TEMPLES: prodded out of his funk

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In Nathan Silver’s comedy Between the Temples:, Jason Schwartzman plays a cantor whose wife’s death the year before has plunged him into despair; he is so paralyzed by depression, he has even lost his ability to sing. He has a chance meeting with his childhood music teacher (Carol Kane), now a retired widow.

Despite her age and his resistance, she insists on joining the bat mitzvah class he teaches at the temple. She’s a force of nature and may have enough gusto to overcome his angst. As their friendship evolves, will it bring him out of his funk?

Between the Temples is co-written by C. Mason Wells and director Nathan Silver. There are plenty of chuckles arising from Schwartzman’s character trying to neutralize his former teacher’s tsunami of will. And there are LOL moments from Madeleine Weinstein’s hilarious turn as as the rabbi’s lovelorn daughter Gabby.

Kane is excellent, and so is Dolly De Leon, who stole Triangle of Sadness, sparkles as a relentlessly determined Jewish mother. The prolific comedy writer Robert Smigel appears as the rabbi.

I screened Between the Temples for this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival; Between the Temples opens in Northern California theaters this weekend.

BENEDETTA: a mystery of belief, made scandalous

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Photo caption: Daphné Patakia (second from left), Virginie Efira (center) and Charlotte Rampling (right) in BENEDETTA. Courtesy of IFC Films.

Benedetta is Paul Verhoeven’s extraordinary film about belief, embedded in scandalous Renaissance history.

Let’s get right to the scandalous part, which has earned Benedetta notoriety since its premiere at Cannes. As a filmmaker, Paul Verhoeven has proven himself to be an enthusiastic provocateur with the lurid Basic Instinct and Showgirls and the more mature (and still subversive) Elle.

So, everybody expects something outrageous from Verhoeven, but, in Benedetta, he plunged right past naughty to sacrilege – two nuns pleasuring each other with a figurine of the Virgin Mary adapted into a dildo. I had originally titled this review “two nuns, a dildo and the Black Death“.

But Benedetta is really a highly entertaining parable, albeit a cynical one, about belief and class. Here’s the story.

It’s the early 1600s in Tuscany, and Benedetta, the precocious and spirited eight-year-old daughter of a rich family (more on that later) enters a convent. Even as a child she attracts strange happenings, which could be miracles or coincidences. She grows into a talented young woman (Virginie Efira of Sibyl). With a gift for performance and her education, she becomes indispensable to the abbess (Charlotte Rampling), whether as the star of religious pageants or in keeping the convent’s books.

When the earthy and saucy Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia) joins the convent, the two become secret lovers.

Benedetta starts having more intense visions – visions of a very tangible Jesus. She starts speaking in a male register, as if possessed by Him. Then she develops stigmata. Holy moly!

Are these real miracles on earth produced by God – supernatural events that result from sincere faith? Or are they a hoax, dishonestly manufactured by Benedetta for her own benefit? Or is she experiencing delusions, hallucinations and disassociation due to what we understand today as a mental disorder?

The canny abbess (Rampling) and the provost (Olivier Rabourdin) the town’s chief religious leader, both from the educated upper class, disdain any possibility of miracles here, but cynically choose to accept the financial benefits of their very own destination for pilgrims. The parish priest, mindful of his superiors’ authority and the new money, turns a blind eye. It’s established early in Benedetta that the convent is run on money, not only on devotion, and that the hierarchy of the Church is entirely corrupt. Unfortunately for the locals, the papal nuncio to Florence (Lambert Wilson) gets wind of the possible chicanery, and he won’t be made a fool of.

Of course, people tend to believe what conforms to their own narratives. In Benedetta, belief in the supernatural is presented not as faith, but as superstition – and it runs along class lines. Benedetta, the abbess, the provost and the nuncio are privileged to have been born to wealth, which brings education and power. The townspeople and the nuns from humble backgrounds are ignorant and gullible – why wouldn’t God appear in my time and my town?

Bartolomea is most assuredly from among the ignorant and powerless, but, between orgasms, she sees what is happening with her own eyes.

Benedetta is based on Judith C. Brown’s book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. Benedetta Carlini, Sister Bartolomea, Father Ricordati and the papal nuncio Alfonso Giglioli are real historical characters. Benedetta and Bartolomea’s sexual liaison, Benedetta’s claims of stigmata and supernatural visions and the Plague in northern Italy all really happened. Verhoeven took some liberties with the ending (and the dildo).

Verhoeven sure lets us know that we are in 17th Century Italy. A hundred years before, Michelangelo and Brunelleschi may have been changing the world’s culture 45 miles away in Florence, but this is still an age where the Church can have someone burned at the stake. This is a world of the bubonic plague, roving bands of mercenary brigands, self-flagellation by the devout and horrific (off-screen) torture.

One of the pleasures of Benedetta is the medieval and Renaissance music on the soundtrack.

There isn’t a bad performance in Benedetta. I gotta say that Charlotte Rampling remains one of my favorite screen actors, with her eyes ranging from the most piercing to the saddest and most knowing. Benedetta is far from her most transgressive film, having starred in The Night Porter (1974). Rampling has delivered some of her most powerful work in the past decade: 45 Years and The Sense of an Ending.

Ever the carnival barker, Paul Verhoeven draws an audience into the tent with over-the-top sex and sacrilege for a thoughtful exploration of faith and superstition. Benedetta is now in a few art house theaters.

KEEP SWEET: a traumatized community, a decade after

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Photo caption: KEEP SWEET. Courtesy of discovery+.

The documentary Keep Sweet traces the remarkable aftermath of the Warren Jeffs child sexual abuse scandal in an isolated settlement of fundamentalist Mormons. A decade after, a tiny community tries to wrangle a new future.

Fundamentalist Mormons broke from the mainstream Church of Latter Day Saints, chiefly over the practice of polygamy, which they call plural marriage, and founded settlements in remote corners of the Great Basin. The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) created a community in the adjoining border hamlets of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona.

In 2002, Warren Jeffs took over as the FLDS’ “prophet”, became the community’s absolute dictator, and implemented a reign of terror that included forcing child marriages to older men and expelling anyone who disagreed with him. This ended in 2006 with Jeff’s conviction on child sexual abuse charges. Warren Jeffs’ DNA established that he had impregnated a 15-year-old “wife”, and there was audio recording of sex with a 12-year-old. The title of this film comes from one of Warren Jeffs’ creepiest exhortations.

Keep Sweet returns to Hildale and Colorado City to find a community traumatized and torn asunder. Many of those victimized by Jeffs have returned to live among Jeffs loyalists, and the power dynamic has shifted. Of course, those on both sides grew up together in the intimacy of a tiny, isolated community.

Keep Sweet is directed by Don Argott (Framing John DeLorean, Art of the Steal, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time). It benefits from footage of the community shot by producer Glenn Meehan a decade earlier; Meehan was documenting the “lost boys” – teenage boys forced to leave Hildale and Colorado City by Jeffs so older men would have less competition for teenage “brides”.

Some of the residents are nostalgic for the Jeffs regime, in denial of Jeffs’ misdeeds, and even ready to lose their homes rather than submit to legal authority. In what I find a sometimes stunning exercise in even-handedness, Argott allows these folks to have their voice and lets the audience members make their own assessments. Argott is sympathetically protective and respectful of everyone’s humanity, no matter how misguided.

For more depth on the Warren Jeffs case itself, I recommend Amy Berg’s fine documentary Prophet’s Prey (Showtime, Amazon, Vudu and YouTube). And for an offbeat fictional narrative on fundamentalist Mormons, there’s Electrick Children (Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube); it’s a story of magical Mormon teen runaways in Vegas (and it was my first look at Julia Garner of Ozark and The Assistant). And there’s the fictional Juniper Creek compound in Big Love, led by characters played by Harry Dean Stanton and Matt Ross.

This is a compelling true story of those who choose to heal – and those who deny that there was any wound to heal. Keep Sweet opens November 24 on discovery+.

https://youtu.be/g3yHV-NC0co

THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE: some dignity for the clown

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Photo caption: Andrew Garfield and Jessica Chastain in THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE

Jessica Chastain’s powerhouse performance in The Eyes of Tammy Faye humanizes and brings dignity to a disgraced celebrity. Tammy Faye, of course, is Tammy Faye Bakker, married to televangelist Jim Bakker of the PTL Club. The relentlessly upbeat couple eschewed fire-and-brimstone for a happy talk ministry based on “Jesus loves you” and “God wants you to be rich”.

Jim Bakker was the preacher and talk show host. Tammy Faye was the singer, puppeteer and sidekick. Tammy Faye’s on-her-sleeve emotions, swinging between pep talks and ready tears – were especially popular (and revenue-inducing) with the PTL Club’s audience.

Of course, the ministry empire was a Ponzi scheme, which eventually sent Jim into federal prison; a sex scandal precipitated the collapse. The story is well-chronicled in the excellent 2000 documentary, also titled The Eyes of Tammy Faye, upon which this movie is based (available to stream on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube).

Jim Bakker (and certainly not Tammy Faye) was the mastermind of the fraud. But Tammy Faye, with her increasingly grotesque makeup and her flamboyant persona, had also become a figure of widespread ridicule, and her fall from grace was also very harsh.

Chastain’s convincing performance is centered on Tammy Faye’s EverReady Bunny exuberance and naive good intentions. Reportedly, she had to spend several hours each day getting outfitted wih prosthetics and daubed with makeup.

Andrew Garfield perfectly captures Jim Bakker’s smarminess and ambiguous sexuality.

Tammy Faye’s mother is played by Cherry Jones (Transparent), who always gives a strong performance. Here she plays a character who starts out seeming to be an emotionally distant, kill-the-dream stick-in-the-mud, but who evolves into the story’s moral anchor.

The one false note in The Eyes of Tammy Faye is Vincent D’Onofrio, who is supposed to be playing Jerry Falwell. Falwell, of course, was rarely seen without his smug grin. Onofrio plays him as a hulking, never smiling menace and with a much different accent and speech pattern than Falwell’s. It’s as if D’Onofrio had never seen Falwell, and his performance completely misses the insincerity and hypocrisy behind Falwell’s veneer of affability.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is now in theaters.

BILLY GRAHAM: the need to pray with Presidents

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Photo caption:BILLY GRAHAM. Photo courtesy of PBS American Experience.

The fine PBS documentary series American Experience brings us Billy Graham, an especially insightful look at back at the famed evangelist.

i hadn’t though much about Billy Graham lately. When I was growing up, Billy Graham was already a national institution and the most famous American religious leader – and the world’s most visible Protestant clergyman. Then, what happened?

Billy Graham traces Graham’s meteoric rise from Boy Wonder preacher to national stardom, taking evangelism from tent revivals in the rural Bible Belt to big city stadiums and television.

That story of Graham’s talent and ambition is interesting in itself, but Billy Graham examines both the strengths of his character and his vulnerability. Graham was rigorously disciplined in refusing to enrich himself and in his strict devotion to his marriage. Almost uniquely for TV preacher, Graham was never tainted by a financial or a sexual scandal and seemed impervious to hypocrisy.

But Billy Graham explores Graham’s yearning to become pastor to Presidents – both to promote his evangelism and as a manifestation of his own vanity. That paid off for Graham with his close relationship with Ike (and Ike and Billy’s impact on the nation’s public religiosity).

But then came Richard Nixon, who Graham was naive enough to think a soul mate. Being publicly anchored to Nixon made Graham’s position as an arbiter of national morality, well, untenable.

Graham’s career – through his consorting with politicians and his pioneering use of mass media – set the stage for the Moral Majority-type politicization of culturally conservative evangelicals. Notably, he intentionally took another path.

In his final act (which I had lost track of), Graham became an international peace campaigner. He mellowed into a more tolerant, less hell-fire theology and we glimpse him on a NYC stage at age 87. I was surprised to learn that Graham died in 2018 at age 99.

You can stream Billy Graham at American Experience.

YES, GOD, YES: learning that hypocrisy is a choice

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Natalia Dyer in YES, GOD, YES

Drawn from the experience of writer/director Karen Maine’s own youth, the sweet coming of age comedy Yes, God, Yes, aims pointed jabs at religious hypocrisy. Bobbing in a sea of peer pressure, Catholic high schooler Alice (Natalia Dyer) heads off with the popular kids to a four-day retreat.

The retreat center is buried in the woods, and the retreat itself has some cultish aspects, with overly smiley/huggy teen youth leaders squeezing out highly personal confessions Authority-with-a-capital-A is present in the form of the high school’s stern young priest. The entire program is designed to make kids feel guilty about their normal, healthy feelings and to scare them from doing what everyone does naturally.

Karen Maine talks about the genesis of Yes, God, Yes in this interview at rogerebert.com.

Amusing throughout, this is not a broad comedy, and there aren’t many guffaws. Instead, it’s a piercing satire based on arch observation of human behavior. The moment where Alice is able to leverage an adult’s hypocrisy against him is very satisfying,

The ironic title, of course, is something someone cries while literally coming a age.

Susan Blackwell is a low-profile character actor who just shows up and steals movies, as she did in last year’s Auggie. In Yes, God, Yes, she’s the character Gina, who owns a lesbian bar and rides a motorcycle, and it’s another great performance.

The Wife was raised Catholic, and she enjoyed this film. Yes, God, Yes is available to stream on Virtual Cinema and will be available from the usual VOD platforms after July 2

THE TWO POPES: surprising complexity

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Anthony Hopkins in THE TWO POPES

Refusing to play it safe, director Francisco Meirelles elevates The Two Popes from would have been a satisfying acting showcase into a thought-provoker. The Two Popes is based on the transition of the papacy from the reactionary German Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) to the tolerant, social justice advocate Argentine Bergoglio (Pope Francis).

Of course, we expect great performances from two of our greatest screen actors, Anthony Hopkins (as Ratzinger) and Jonathan Pryce (Bergoglio). These guys are great, especially Hopkins, who has the task of making us see the humanity in a cold, humorless, doctrinaire character.

The story is a natural odd couple match-up set in a moment of historical drama, and, with Pryce and Hopkins, that would be enough for most filmmakers. But Meirelles takes it up a notch with an unexpected second flashback to Bergoglio’s career as a Jesuit leader during the brutal Argentine coup in the 1970’s. I didn’t se this coming, and it illuminates Bergoglio’s experience, more complicated than initially apparent. Credit the construction and the added complexity to Meirelles (City of God) screenwriter Anthony McCarten (Darkest Hour The Theory of Everything).

BTW The Two Popes is shot in the Vatican, including the Sistine Chapel, and the papal summer getaway, Castel Gandolfo. Way cool.

The Two Popes is streaming on Netflix.

A SHELTER AMONG THE CLOUDS: a simple man regards the rest of humanity

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A SHELTER AMONG THE CLOUDS

“People love God but not each other,” observes Besnik, the protagonist of the Albanian drama A Shelter Among the Clouds. It’s a simple sentiment from a simple man, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t profound.

Besnik tends a herd of goats in a mountainous village that is remote even by Albanian standards. A devout Muslim, Besnik is more spiritual than most people. He discovers an ancient Christian mural in the ancient local mosque. That makes him a hero to the village Catholics, but the new development is very unwelcome to his imam. All of the villagers  – Catholic and Muslim – are suspicious of the team of experts sent by the national government to study and restore his discovery.

Besnik has been caring for his dying father, and when his Greek Orthodox brother and Muslim sister return to visit and to position themselves over the upcoming inheritance, things get tense.  In contrast to the remarkable landscape beauty of the harsh mountains, small mindedness and selfishness abound with most of the locals and within Besnik’s family. The guileless Besnik is baffled when people react less generously than the Koran prescribes.

This is a visually beautiful exploration of human behavior. Arben Bajraktaraj delivers a pure performance as Besnik. Writer-director Robert Budina, with his second feature, has delivered a moving and beautiful film. Note: This is an especially unhurried film, so settle in and let it wash over you.

Cinequest is hosting the North American premiere of A Shelter Among the Clouds, one of the World Cinema highlights of this year’s festival.