“The Two Popes” - Fernando Meirelles (2019)

The Two Popes (2019) is a biographical drama about the two most recent Popes of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.  The story mostly consists of fabricated conversations that could have taken place between these two figures, based on what is known about them, during 2005-2013, when Benedict XVI served as head of the Church and the man later to become Pope Francis was still Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio.  Now you might think that a film that is mostly a presentation of “talking heads” – and one confined in this case to just two very old men, at that – would be boring to watch.  But The Two Popes turns out to be a fascinating and enlightening viewing experience [1,2,3,4], and one that held my interest all the way along .

Directed by Fernando Meirelles (known for City of God (2002) and The Constant Gardener (2005)), the film was written by Anthony McCarten (his script is based on his 2017 play The Pope); and it features nuanced acting performances on the part of its two leads, Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce.  The latter three figures have each been nominated, in connection with this film, for Oscars, Golden Globes, and BAFTA Film awards in their respective categories – Best Adapted Screenplay (Anthony McCarten), Best Actor (Jonathan Pryce), and Best Supporting Actor (Anthony Hopkins). 

Although the film is generally carefully made and edited, there is one detriment to the production that reduces one’s viewing enjoyment – the cinematography of César Charlone.  Throughout the film there are noticeably shaky hand-held camera shots of closeups during conversations, which should be held static.  This is a major problem, because much of the film consists of conversational closeups, where the viewer must focus on subtle facial expressions expressing emotional nuances of the speaker and attentive listener.  In addition on many of these shots, the camera framing is poor and distracting.  And in other circumstances, outside of the conversations, there are often unmotivated, wildly swerving camera pans that are also distracting to the viewer.  This sloppy camera work is surprising to me, because César Charlone was also the cinematographer for Meirelles’s City of God and The Constant Gardener, two excellent  films that I don’t recall having had poor cinematography.

Nevertheless, the film has its virtues, and I would say that the truly standout positive element in the film is McCarten’s script.  It manages to artfully articulate and convey, through the extended dialogues between the two main characters, two very different faces and potential directions of the Catholic Church.  Both of these faces have their rationales and significant backing worldwide:

• Pope Benedict XVI seeks to maintain the Church as a bastion of traditional values.  This is based on the idea that the Church has staunchly upheld these unchanging values throughout the many centuries of turbulent human history and thereby has always served as a constant beacon of hope for the faithful all over the world.
   
• Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio seeks to fashion a more humane and forgiving Church that more sensitively reaches out with compassion to all the people who may be suffering in the world.  This would mean, for example, relaxing some of the rigid Church restrictions now in force concerning clerical celibacy, homosexuality, and abortion.  Instead of an unchanging Church, Bergoglio wants one that adapts to the world’s changing circumstances so that it can continue to demonstrate how God can always be an active part of today’s world.

So Benedict is the conservative, and Bergoglio is the progressive [5]. The cleverness of the script lies in situating these complex notions in a natural conversational format that not only outlines the thematic differences, but also reveals the basic warmth and humanity of the two characters.  (Since the two of them could both speak Italian, French, English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and Church Latin, it was fortunate for me that their language medium of exchange in this film was English.)

Anyway, the story of The Two Popes begins in 2005 with the death of Pope John Paul II, which meant that the more than one hundred Cardinals around the world had to come to the Vatican in Rome in order to participate in a Papal conclave to elect a new Pope.  Among these Cardinals are the conservative German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (played by Anthony Hopkins) and the progressive Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce).  After a couple of indecisive ballots, Ratzinger is elected and becomes new Pope Benedict XVI.  Bergoglio finished second in the voting and returns to Argentina.

Then the time shifts forward to 2012.  Cardinal Bergoglio is seeking retirement, but he now finds himself summoned for unknown reasons to the Vatican by Pope Benedict.  The Papacy, the viewer is reminded, has been afflicted in recent years by several scandals, including the Vatican Leaks Scandal [6] and the coverup of reported pedophilia among the clergy.  So we may wonder if Bergoglio’s call to Rome is associated with some of those problems.  Anyway, when he arrives in Rome, Bergoglio is taken to the Pope’s summer residence, where he begins his private conversations with the Pope.

Bergoglio wants to get Pope Benedict’s authorization of his retirement, but Benedict keeps changing the subject and wants only to talk about their theological differences.  And this is where the film gets into its interesting depths.  Benedict asserts his conservative adherence to tradition, while Bergoglio says the Church has not always been static, and he advocates a more accommodating approach.  He reminds Benedict that clerical celibacy was not imposed by the Church before the 12th century, and there was even no mention of angels before the 5th century. 

Finally, after discussing various issues, like Church tolerance of homosexuality and whether Bergoglio has been right in his practice to give holy sacraments to those outside of communion, Benedict emphatically asserts in frustration that “God does not change!”  But Bergoglio softly responds with the warm counter-assertion that God is always moving – and He is always moving towards us.

As the two continue their discussions, they become more affably cordial towards each other, and they talk about pop music and favorite television shows.  Benedict even sits down at the piano and plays some light music for Bergoglio.  And Bergoglio recounts to Benedict about his early days before entering the Church when he had a secular job and was engaged to be married to a girl he loved..  But then one day he heard the “Call” and joined the Jesuits.  For his part, Benedict wonders aloud worriedly that he fears he no longer can hear God’s call within himself.

Then they are taken to the Vatican, and they meet up again alone in the Sistine Chapel.  There Benedict finally reveals to Bergoglio why he summoned him to the Vatican.  He intends to resign from the Papacy, something that hasn’t been done for seven centuries.  And far from accepting Bergoglio’s resignation, he wants him to become the new Pope.

But Bergoglio doesn’t want to accept this promotion, because he feels he has committed grave sins in the past.  He confesses that during the Argentinian Dirty War (1976-83) [7], he made too many concessions to the despotic Argentinian dictators of this time in order to protect the Church.  He regrets not having stood up more for those who were suffering from torture and murder at the hands of the cruel junta regime that was engaged in state terrorism (as many as 30,000 innocent citizens were “disappeared” during this period [7]).  As a result of his relative inaction during that period, Bergoglio was later removed from being head of the Argentinians Jesuits and ordered to serve as an ordinary priest for ten years (1983-93).  So he now feels he is unworthy of being Pope. 

However, Benedict has his own humble confessions to offer in return, and he still insists that Bergoglio is the right man for the Papacy.  In the end the two men, both humbly seeking forgiveness, become closer than ever, and they formally absolve each other in turn of their past sins.  Before he returns to Argentina, Bergoglio even shows Benedict how to do the tango.

We then move forward to 2013, and Bergoglio is shown being formally elected as Pope Francis, who is the first Jesuit pope, the first from the southern hemisphere, and the first from outside Europe since the eighth-century .  The finals shots show the two confirmed friends, Benedict and Francis, amicably sitting together on a couch in front of a TV and watching the 2014 FIFA World Cup Soccer Final between their respective favorite teams, Germany and Argentina.


All films have a narrative structure, and it is this narrative, or narratives, that command our interest.  In The Two Popes there are three intertwined narrative threads – those of Pope Benedict, Cardinal Bergoglio, and the Catholic Church, itself.  The two personages, Benedict and Bergoglio, are both earnest, well-intentioned, and selfless, but my own sympathies are more naturally aligned with the more humane and warm-hearted Bergoglio.  What makes the film compelling is the way it shows how narrative progression on the institutional (Catholic Church) scale can be so crucially affected by subtle exchanges on the human scale (even if the historical authenticity of those portrayed human-scale exchanges are unverified).  These human-scale exchanges, brilliantly portrayed by the two Welshmen, Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins, are what make The Two Popes a fascinating work.

★★★½

Notes:

1. Philip Kemp, “The Two Popes review: opposites attract in this brilliantly acted tale of papal succession”, Sight & Sound, (4 December 2019).   
2. Odie Henderson, “The Two Popes”, RogerEbert.com, (27 November 2019).   
3. Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, “The Two Popes”, Spirituality & Practice, (n.d.).   
4. Peter Debruge, “Telluride Film Review: ‘The Two Popes’”, Variety, (2 September 2019).  
5. Vinson Cunningham, “Will Pope Francis Cause a Schism in the Catholic Church?”, The New Yorker, (9 April 2018).      
6. “Vatican leaks scandal”, Wikipedia, (12 January 2020).   
7. “Dirty War”, Wikipedia, (24 January 2020).   

Fernando Meirelles

Films of Fernando Meirelles:

• The Constant Gardener - Fernando Meirelles (2005)
• The Two Popes - Fernando Meirelles (2019)

“The Constant Gardener” - Fernando Meirelles (2005)

The Constant Gardener (2005), one of the best films of the past decade, has had numerous admirers, but because of its many themes, it has been viewed, and criticized, from a number of different angles. Based on John Le Carre’s 2001 novel of the same name, the film can be variously experienced as primarily a mystery/thriller, an expose of the pharmaceutical industry, an expose of Western statecraft’s subservience to globalized capitalism, or a love story, depending on one’s predilections. In fact the task of taking Le Carre’s typically intricate novel of 550-plus pages and somehow fashioning an entertaining, not to mention comprehensible, two-hour movie out of the material must have been daunting. But I would say Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles was definitely up to the task, and he made superb choices to create something special – a gripping cinematic story that has a reflective philosophical motif at its core. Meirelles had already attracted international intention with his spectacular previous outing, The City of God (2002), which was a startling, visceral drama about crime in the Rio de Janeiro suburban slums. With The Constant Gardener, his first English language film, he displayed further mastery and an impressive new expressive dimension.

Yes, The Constant Gardener could be said to be about corruption, intrigue, capitalism, and love, but this is not just a random collection of themes – there is something in this film that ties all these seemingly disparate things together in terms of a larger theme. I will try to explain.

The protagonist, Justin Quayle, is a mid-level British diplomat stationed in Kenya, whose modest, civilized character is symbolized by his avocation of gardening. He is a gentleman in every way, and he lives well within the boundaries of his (and our) culture, as it has been defined to all of us in our upbringing. This is a society governed by the rule of law, human rights, freedom of expression, and equal opportunity. But, curiously, our culture predominantly characterizes these things in selfish terms. It is said, especially by libertarians, that it is in our enlightened self-interests to obey the laws and to support freedom-of-action and human rights as much as possible. This general credo of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is promoted, because there is a payoff promised to us if we follow it. We, individually, will all be happier, we are assured, if everyone conforms to these norms. Society sets up various punishments if we don’t follow the norms, and to ensure even more faithful adherence, our religions promise us that God is watching us at all times and will reward us in the afterlife if we live virtuously. Of course, selfish pleasure-seekers might not see the big picture, so the need to be constrained, but we educated ones (who are presumably enlightened and see the bit picture) will follow the rules, because they are in our long-term selfish interests.

This ethos of enlightened self interest is extended into our capitalistic economic sphere to the notion of a corporation. Corporations are legally identified as “individuals” that are expected to operate according to their enlightened self interests (i.e. the interests of their share-holders). According to this scheme, we humans have evolved from the savage beasts, which our forebears once were, by learning that cooperation gives us a competitive advantage: cooperation and rule-following is in our selfish interests, because it gives us a competitive advantage. This selfish-competitive mantra barely needs repeating today and has become second nature to us. Nevertheless, despite this conventional notion of (hopefully enlightened) self-interested behavior, we intuitive know that there is something missing from this cultural picture: empathy. And it is empathy that is ultimately the overriding theme of The Constant Gardener.

The concept of empathy, though, has often been dismissed by the academic community. Logical positivists, behaviorists, and other scientific reductionists dismiss conventional notions of the mind, such as beliefs and desires, as merely examples of “folk psychology”. To them these ideas are part o f loose talk that may be satisfactory fir casual conversation, but they are held to be unscientific and must ultimately be superceded by a more neurophysiological-based scientific characterization, just as the notion of magnetic poles was superceded by Maxwell’s more accurate model of electromagnetism. And even most of those other scholars who do regard “folk psychology” as a useful descriptive framework don’t have much use for the notion of empathy – they are satisfied that all human decision-making can be understood on the basis of the mental notions of beliefs and desires.

Nevertheless, empathy is a real and primordial mental faculty, even if we don’t yet fully understand it. Whenever we exchange eye-to-eye contact with another person, or even another mammal, there is a mutual awareness of another sentient being that is being observed. This evokes the glimmerings of empathy. Neurophysiological evidence from brain imaging reveals that mostly the same areas of the brain are activated both when we feel pain and when we observe another animal subjected to pain. That similar response of sharing pain with the other is empathy. As a consequence of these studies and also the re-emergence of phenomenology, the notion of empathy has attracted renewed attention from philosophers [1,2] and biologists [3,4,5] as a fundamental category of human interaction. De Walls even points to an innate “inequity aversion” in animals:

“A dog will repeatedly perform a trick without rewards, but refuse as soon as another dog gets pieces of sausage for the same trick. Recently, Sarah reported an unexpected twist to the inequity issue, however. While testing pairs of chimps, she found that also the one who gets the better deal occasionally refuses. It is as if they are satisfied only if both get the same. We seem to be getting close to a sense of fairness.” [3]

But despite these studies and our own intuitive convictions that empathy is real, there is still a problem – empathy is not really wired into our conventional social culture. That culture is still based almost exclusively on self-interests. Corporations and government organizations are instructed to evaluate the world on the basis of their own selfish interests, and moral behaviour is assumed to only arise on the basis of those long-term interests.

In The Constant Gardener, the protagonist, Justin Quayle meets and falls in love with a beautiful young woman who is very much attuned to her own empathic feelings towards her fellow beings. The principal narrative theme concerns how Justin eventually understands and shares that empathic passion with her.

The plot of the film can be divided into roughly four sections or acts, each of which represents a successive stage in Justin’s journey towards enlightenment and commitment. The focalization of the film is almost entirely limited to Justin, but there are a few scenes just outside Justin’s scope and which are mostly centered around Justin’s boss in Kenya, Sandy Woodrow.

1. Justin and Tessa.
The opening scene shows Justin kissing his wife, Tessa, good-bye at the Nairobi airport, just prior to her departure with a companion, Dr. Arnold Bluhm, to the northern Kenyan city of Lokichogio. The next shots reveal that she has been murdered somewhere on the road, and Justin must go to the morgue to identify her body. The rest of this act is devoted to flashbacks about how Justin came to meet and fall in love with Tessa. She was a political science student and liberal activist who attended a guest lecture given by Justin. Their romance was rapid, as the self-confident Tessa readily welcomed Justin’s shy advances. Soon it was she who proposed that he marry her and take her back with him to his diplomatic assignment in Africa. Once there she soon partners with a black African doctor, Arnold Bluhm, in connection with her passion to improve the health and welfare of poverty-stricken natives. The close association of Bluhm with the liberal Tessa makes Justin feel uneasy, and he fears that the two may be intimate. In connection with Tessa’s work with Bluhm, she learned that a large, international drug corporation, KVH, was compelling poor natives seeking AIDS treatment to undergo testing of Dypraxa, an unproven tuberculosis (TB) drug with known, sometimes fatal, side effects. KVH and their local heatlhcare partners administering the tests, ThreeBees Corp., were covering up the deaths caused by the Dypraxa tests.

2. The Conspiracy Revealed.
We return the “present”, with Justin and his boss, British High Commissioner (i.e. Ambassador) Sandy Woodrow in the morgue. Because Arnold Bluhm is missing, it is assumed by the government that he was Tessa’s lover and brutal murderer. The grief-stricken Justin wants to know more about these murky circumstances and why their home was ransacked after her death, so he begins to investigate. Justin learns that Tessa had sent a report, via Sandy Woodrow, to Sir Bernard Pelligrin, head of the Africa desk of the British Foreign Service, revealing the conspiracy of KVH and ThreeBees and accusing them of blatant illegalities and wrongful deaths. Tessa had subsequently learned that her letter was suppressed by Pelligrin, and she had then conspired to get hold of Pelligrin’s abusive and self-incriminating letter dismissing her revelations. Justin now knows that the British government was in on the conspiracy in order to assist its corporate allies.

3. Justin on the Trail.

Justin is now determined to follow up on Tessa’s investigation. He returns to England, where his passport is confiscated, and he realizes that he is now seen as an enemy of the British Foreign Service. He acquires a fake passport so that he can continue his clandestine consultations with some of Tessa’s fellow social activists in Europe. And despite beatings and death threats from paid thugs, the mild-mannered diplomat’s resolve is firm. He learns about Tessa’s acquisition of Pelligrin’s self-damning letter, and also he learns both that Bluhm was not really Tessa’s secret lover, but only an innocent victim, and that Tessa’s ill-fated trip to Lokichogio was connected with her efforts to meet a developer of Dypraxa, Dr. Lorbeer. His sights are now set on finding Lorbeer back in Africa.

4. The End of the Road.
Returning to Africa, Justin accumulates more crucial evidence about the conspiracy, but learns from the cynical but sympathetic head of MI5 in Kenya, Tim Donohue, that the British government has taken a contract out on his life, just as it had done with Bluhm and Tessa. Justin doggedly goes ahead manages to track down the eccentric Lorbeer in Sudan, acquire from him the damning letter from Pelligrin, and get it dispatched back to allies in England where it can be revealed to the public. But he knows he cannot escape his tragic fate.

Throughout The Constant Gardener Justin’s sense of empathy expands towards the wider circles encompassed by Tessa’s. In Act 1, he is a sensitive, caring man in love, but his concern is primarily with Tessa. Right after her miscarriage in Kenya, Tessa beseeches Justin to give ride in their car to a poor African boy who must walk back to his village forty kilometers away. Justin denies her request, saying that they cannot attend to all the poor people in Africa and that her health must come first. But she protests, to no avail, that this is one person who needs help and that they can help. This exemplified her existential engagement of sympathy, something that could take precedence over more practical considerations in some situations. Towards the end, in Act 4, Justin has adopted Tessa’s perspective. While trying to escape a murderous attack by brigands on the Sudanese village he is visiting, Justin asks the pilot to take onboard a poor black girl who had been working with Lorbeer. This time the roles are reversed, and the pilot repeats Justin’s earlier practical, rule-based argument, denying Justin’s empathic appeal. In response to “we can’t save everybody”, Justin (echoing Tessa) says, “yes, bu we can save this person!". In both situations the empathy-denying responses seemed reasonable, but they reflect the fact that our organizations seem to have no place for empathy.

There are four significant characters in the film who show a certain degree of sympathy for Justin’ situation, but they all fall short of true empathy.

1. Sir Bernard Pelligrin expresses sympathy in Act 2 to Justin for the death of Tessa, but, of course, he is lying and was a direct cause of her death. His utter hypocrisy puts him at the lowest level.
2. Sir Kenneth Curtiss, the CEO of ThreeBees, helps Justin in Act 4 by supplying him evidence of ThreeBees own culpability. But this is merely an act of revenge, since he knows that he is about to get dumped in the corporate world, and he wants to take others down with him. His vengeful action is not the empathy we seek.
3. Sandy Woodrow weeps at the death of Tessa and appears to show sympathy. But we later learn that he is a weak and self-seeking individual and that his feelings for Tessa were entirely selfish.
4. The spymaster Tim Donohue sympathizes with Justin, because he, too, is doomed, in his case with a terminal illness. But his empathic action does not extend to all his fellow creatures, as it does with Tessa, and later Justin, but is merely directed to a similarly powerless individual.

All of the men above were operating inside systems and organizations for which empathy has no reward and no place. And perhaps it says something about our culture that the two worst scoundrels in the story had been bestowed with the honor of knighthood. Although some of these men were dimly aware of these shortcomings, they were all submissive to the status quo of selfishness. Only Tessa heroically rebelled against that situation, and so, too, in the end, did Justin.

The mise-en-scene of Meirelles in The Constant Gardener is fascinating in the way it skillfully maintains a feeling of anxiety via its impressionistic renderings. We, the viewers, are like Justin and stand outside of the major, critical happenings. The murders of Tessa and Arnold Bluhm are not even shown; we are only given the information after the fact. Similarly, Tessa’s miscarriage in the hospital and her visit to Dr. Lorbeer are not shown directly. Everything is seen from the narrative perspective of Justin, who is trying to catch up with a series of machinations that are outside of his control. There is considerable camera movement, along with a stream of perspectival compositions, that sustain this anxious, impressionistic mood, all the while maintaining a smooth visual continuity and dynamic flow. At the same time Meirelles also gives the viewer impressionistic shots of winsome, joyful black children in the villages that evoke unconscious empathy on the part of the viewer. One can't help but recognize that they are our brothers and sisters who deserve a better deal.

The acting is uniformly good, especially, that of Ralph Fiennes, whose introspective portrayal of Justin is reminiscent of his performance in The English Patient (1996). Rachel Weisz (Tessa) and Danny Huston (Sandy) also stand out.

As for the subject matter, what could be a more appropriate industry on which to focus this issue of empathy than the healthcare industry? Healthcare should be founded on empathy, but the corporate practices are everywhere governed by selfish profit. In a review of Le Carre’s novel that is sympathetic to the profit-driven pharmaceutical industry, the author remarks [6]

“The author also touches on real-life social concerns, such as the possible coercion of needy patients, the solicitation of favorable reports and testimonials by opinion leaders, and the ghostwriting of such testimonials by sponsoring pharmaceuticals firms themselves. The reader is also exposed to some of the realities of biomedical publishing, such as the difficulty of communicating negative data in premier medical journals, the potential for censorship of unpopular data by biased peer reviewers, and the use of confidentiality agreements that can prevent company employees and their associates from communicating research findings.”
. . .
“However, the practices attributed to KVH do not appear to be out of line with real-life pharmaceutical R&D activities. KVH met or exceeded the regulatory requirements for clinical safety and efficacy necessary to achieve market approval in three countries. It is not uncommon to adjust clinical protocols, as the fictional company appears to do, when adverse events are observed, in order to ensure safety. Similarly, pharma companies often seek the endorsement of key opinion leaders, as does KVH, as a way of encouraging the medical community to use a new drug. Finally, confidentiality agreements are standard practice in the pharmaceutical industry; they are designed to protect the huge financial investment that underlies drug development and to control disclosure of data about drugs that are still under development.”

So the practices described in the film (presumably accurately following Le Carre’s text) are apparently standard with the pharmaceutical industry, and these are exclusively driven by the selfish interests of profit. Maybe we need something a little different for the healthcare field. In fact, maybe we need to consider how corporations, in general, could be restructured for the better, in order to go beyond their present selfish orthodoxy. This is the subject of the recent book by Dev Patnaik, Wired to Care, which argues that the corporations today lack empathy and that for them to be more effectively service-oriented, they will need to establish a more widely held sense of empathy for their customers.

At the end of the film while awaiting his grim fate, Justin soliloquizes aloud to his departed Tessa, "I know your secret now". That secret was Tessa's feeling of engaged compassion towards the entire world. Justin had moved in the film from the withdrawn world of the gardener, to the passionate embrace of his beloved, and on to that level of comprehensive compassionate engagement. We need to do that in a more inclusive fashion and think about empathy in a wider, social context. Perhaps The Constant Gardener may be a little bit helpful in getting us to think and feel along these lines.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Karsten Stueber, "Empathy", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empathy/.
2. Karsten R. Stueber, Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the HumanSciences, The MIT Press, 2005.
3. Frans de Waal , The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society, Three Rivers P:ress, 2010.
4. Frans de Waal, “Morals without God”, New York Times, 17 October 2010, (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/morals-without-god/?ref=afternoonupdate&nl=afternoonupdate&emc=auab1).
5. Frans de Waal, “Fair Play: Monkeys Share Our Sense of Injustice”, New Scientist, 11 November 2009.(http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/empathy/Reviewfiles/fairplay_NS.html).
6. Rebecca Anderson, “The Drug that Came in From the Cold”, Molecular Interventions, American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, 2004, (http://molinterv.aspetjournals.org/content/4/1/60.full).