Pope Francis: A Man of His Word
The feature documentary Pope Francis: A Man of His Word drips with every bit of sincerity implied in the title. Perhaps you bristle at the idea of exalting a nice man who serves as figurehead to a questionable committee of old white men doing old white things, and fair enough. In service of this particular picture, though, it’s best to set that brand of cynicism aside.
Wim Wenders directs and sparsely narrates the film. (You might know him as the man behind Wings of Desire, Paris, Texas, The Buena Vista Social Club and New German Cinema, generally.) Wender’s camera follows the pope around the globe as he visits a series of downtrodden, irrepressibly human locales. Besides that, we get interview clips from the man himself, the content of which is always philosophical and never personal. “The world today is mostly deaf,” the pope tells us matter-of-factly, in subtitled Italian. Other critics have pointed out the film’s lack of autobiographical details about its subject, but I didn’t notice. (Idea for a supplemental featurette to go along with the pope movie DVD special features: An Origin Story: Do We Need It?) In the beginning, we see a cute little girl in a crowded auditorium ask the man why he wanted to be pope, and the pope says, “I never wanted to be pope. Is that okay?” That’s biography enough for me.
Besides images of his outreach work and interviews, there are silent-film style re-enactments of the original St. Francis, famous for his vow of poverty, his commitment to preserving Mother Earth and to reconciling differences between Christianity and Islam. And what do you know, that’s totally this current pope’s whole thing, too.
The Catholic Church was long overdue for a South American figurehead, and then here strolls in this Argentinian who eschews richly goods, cares a lot about the environment and accepts homosexuals, women and so on. More than anything, the new pope is obsessed with poverty and the corrosive powers of wealth. “We either serve God or we serve money,” he says. And he really seems to mean it. It’s hard to not be charmed by the man’s erudite message and the rockstar effect he has on his enormous swarms of followers. The film follows Francis to small villages in South America, large crowds in Italy and to hospitals filled with dying children in Africa. I was particularly stirred by his visit to a prison in Philadelphia. The reaction shot of a prisoner crying during the pope’s speech made me cry in turn, but I should explain: Crying tough men nearly always have this effect on me. For heaven’s sake, we watch him wash a prisoner’s tattooed foot; I am not made of stone.
The movie is built to elicit these kinds of feeling in us. Beyond this, Pope Francis: A Man of His Word is barely a movie. Movies have stories that arc to a crescendo and then conclude; this is more a traveling sermon with words and pictures. (If Buddhism is more your thing, Werner Herzog made essentially the same picture with the Dalai Lama in 2003’s Wheel of Time. Rent it today!) Catholics and maybe other devout believers will sink into this film like a warm bath. I started out a little salty, and even at 96 minutes, it begins to stretch a bored mind’s patience. Ultimately though, I’m a good sport who loves love. As such, the movie works on me. Otherwise, I suspect the title is warning enough to keep the most hardened cynics among us away.