It’s not as though we have a lot of other papal buddy dramedies to compare “The Two Popes” with, so director Fernando Meirelles’ (“City of God”) film is certainly a standout in its fictionalized look at the friendship between the most recent leaders of the Catholic Church. And he couldn’t have asked for a better duo to perform this two-man show: Anthony Hopkins as the severe Pope Benedict and Jonathan Pryce as the gentle, modern, more accessible Pope Francis.
The film sees Pryce’s Francis — for most of this movie, he’s the Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio — traveling to the Vatican to deliver his resignation to Pope Benedict. It’s a delivery vehicle for a walk-and-talk debate between the two men, whose views on the practice of Catholicism diverge wildly.
Hopkins plays Pope Benedict XVI — the German-born Joseph Ratzinger — as an intelligent but lonely and humorless pontiff who’s perplexed by Bergoglio’s love of soccer, jokes and, seemingly, the company of other people. He refuses to grant Bergoglio his wish, obscuring that he might be grooming the other man for the job in the run-up to his controversial decision to resign the papacy in the wake of roiling allegations of a widespread cover-up of sex abuse by priests.
The screenplay, by Anthony McCarten (“Bohemian Rhapsody”), delves deeply into Bergoglio’s past, particularly his actions during the political upheaval in his country during the 1970s that unintentionally resulted in the torture and death of Jesuit friends, and contributed to his radical reign as a glamour-eschewing modernist pope.
But the film head-scratchingly never trains a similar magnifying glass on the history of Ratzinger, a man whose boyhood membership in the Hitler Youth led to his being reviled by some as a Nazi sympathizer. The film’s refusal to look at Benedict in kind is a major weak spot, seeing as it purports to examine both members of an unlikely but understandable friendship, borne of the knowledge of an office whose weight few can truly comprehend. If nothing else, the mere sight of two popes drinking brews and watching a soccer game together is one of the more surreal things you’ll see at the movies this year.
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