Nanni Moretti's We Have a Pope
We Have a Pope (opening April 6th), director/writer Nanni Moretti’s new film about an elected pontiff (Michael Piccoli) who has a panic attack and refuses to present himself on the balcony of the Vatican, is the work of an admitted “non-believer.” It contains no Catholic caricatures, no references to priest sex scandals, and is as little critical toward the Church as any movie could be. Even Vatican Radio endorsed it. That’s all very well, but the movie is rambling, odd, without any obvious point or plot, and is—if I can be blunt—bad. Catholics are welcomed to see it and would not be offended by its portrayal of cardinals, Vatican spokespeople, or Il Papa himself, but if they’ve ever seen a good movie before and have any powers of comparison, I’d advise them to stay home.
Moretti, in interviews, is defiantly proud of his film and won’t hear a word against it. Perhaps this is because he thinks he did something with it that he affirmatively did not. There were two ways Moretti could have taken We Have a Pope, that is to say comically or dramatically. The film has endless potential for comedy, concerning a cardinal, referred to only by his last name, Melville, who, when elected Pope as a dark horse candidate, has a panic attack, insisting he can’t do it and then escaping his Vatican retainers and disappearing into Rome. Moretti could have taken this to the extreme, turning Father Melville into a Mel Brooks-type character, who wanders through the city getting up to mischief a Pope usually skirts. But there’s potential for drama, too. Soon after Melville’s difficulties, the Vatican brings in a world-renowned psychoanalyst, Professor Brezzi (Moretti). Moretti (as a writer, not as Brezzi) could also have leaned toward a King’s Speech-style relationship, a very dramatic and serious situation which ended with an overcoming of Melville’s fears. The problem, I think, is that the proud Nanni Moretti refused to look to the work of his predecessors and insisted on making a film that had no clear definition, and hovered somewhere in between drama and comedy. In the right hands this can lead to something great, but in Moretti’s it seems indecisive and strange, and the audience can’t get behind the decisions the characters make.
For one, Melville says the reason he can’t take the job is because he “can’t remember anything.” I’m no Brezzi, but that doesn’t seem like a valid plot point, considering Melville can remember everything—he doesn’t have amnesia (if he had, the film would have made infinitely more sense) and he spouts information from his past constantly, including some tales that spark a useless story detour wherein he becomes obsessed with a community theater production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. And that’s not the only deviation from the storyline. Characters veer back and forth from the three-act method constantly, starting up volleyball tournaments to keep the cardinals, trapped in conclave, occupied, sending out search parties for Melville and then immediately giving up on them, installing a Swiss guard in the papal apartments to fool the crowd in St. Peter’s Square, and various other nonsensical pursuits. These ridiculous and useless diversions mean nothing to the actual storyline. As a result they end up detracting from any actual progress, to say nothing of where the story is going, which—spoiler alert—is nowhere.
I could say that We Have a Pope tried to be funny or dramatic, but it didn’t even make an attempt. The content creators for the film appeared to wait by the sidelines as Brezzi did in the volleyball games he created, and just stand by to see where it went. Sorry, Moretti—looks like you bet on the wrong team.
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