reviewed by Debra Murphy
CHANNELING GREATNESS
When I first heard about this made-for-TV project depicting the life of John Paul the Great, I wasn’t particularly enthused. For one thing, it’s very hard to get the life of a saint right without resorting to treacle. For another, a perfectly fine film of John Paul’s life (The Man Who Would Become Pope) had already been made a year or so before using largely unknown Polish actors. Lastly, it’s often problematic to hire famous actors (in this case Cary Elwes and Jon Voight) to play famous people, as the former’s own celebrity, sometimes notoriety, can bring associational baggage that gets in the way of a viewer’s ability to emotionally engage in the subject’s story.
In the case of Pope John Paul II, though I have been a fan of Cary Elwes ever since he played Wesley in the classic fairy-tale comedy The Princess Bride, I had a hard time remembering when I really enjoyed one of Jon Voight’s movies. For all that one must, I suppose, acknowledge that Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home are well-made films, I just can’t stand them. (And I must be one of the few movie lovers who has never seen Deliverance.) Then there was Voight’s (to me) sacrilegious turn as a traitorous Jim in the first Mission Impossible movie. I grew up with Peter Graves’ incorruptible television persona, and was furious with everyone involved in the movie version. Finally, the best I could say about the recent National Treasure, in which Voight placed Nicholas Cage’s father, was that it was amusing and innocuous.
Ergo, the thought of Voight playing John Paul the Great, the man who has had more influence on my Catholic thinking and worldview than perhaps anyone save John Henry Cardinal Newman, was not comforting. I was prepared to not like this film.
Well, I was in for a surprise. The movie, though in two short hours provides little more than a sort of Cliff’s Notes tour through Karol Wojtyla’s incredibly eventful life, played it the right way by playing it transparently and to the point. The director, John Kent Harrison, wasted no valuable screen time by lingering on predictable reaction shots intended to evoke emotion in the presumably pious viewers. Thus Harrison resisted what seems to me the greatest temptation for makers of religious flms: to signal the audience how they should be feeling, and go for the Big Weep. (Marco Frisina’s music score did occasionally slip into sentimentality, making me long for il Maestro Ennio Morricone, who had scored The Man Who Became Pope.) But the overall temper of the movie was understated and restrained; as a result I was crying anyway after only a few minutes, during the opening sequence recounting the day (May 13, 1981) when John Paul was shot—an effective way, narratively speaking, to begin the film, with a seriously wounded Pope remembering, as it were, how he had come to this place of destiny.
Flashback then to Poland and Karol Wojtyla’s youth. Much as I like Cary Elwes, I actually thought this portion of the film, especially the period depicting the Nazi occupation of Poland, also suffered by comparison to The Man Who Became Pope. The latter, with its largely Polish cast, looked and felt more authentic, and spent almost two hours on this one dramatic and formative period in Wojtyla’s life. But then it has become increasingly tricky, it seems to me, to pull off WWII and the Holocaust, cinematically speaking. We’ve all “seen” it and read about it so many times that it seems to get harder and harder to invoke the horrors of the period without resorting to increasingly graphic spectacles of violence. Pope John Paul II, I thought, took the nervous way out by telescoping the whole scary period into perhaps fifteen minutes of bland and seen-it-all-before storytelling. .
The quality (and my interest) picked up, however, as soon as the Nazis left and the Soviets arrived on scene, because along with the Russians and their Polish stooges came James Cromwell as Cardinal Sapieha, and the incomparable Christopher Lee as Cardinal Wyszynski. Together Sapieha and Wyszynski steer Karol (and Poland) through the Communist occupation. This period, too, is covered in a very short amount of screen time, but the superb acting of the principles manages notwithstanding to convey something of how these canny old ecclesial foxes kept the brutish regime from doing its worst to the Church.
Then comes the election of Wojtyla to the papacy, and Voight takes over the role of Pope John Paul II. As one who closely followed the travels and talks of JPII, all I can say is that I quickly went from a feeling of pleasant surprise that Voight wasn’t messing it up, after all—messing it up by hamming it up and aiming at the rafters, which is what I was expecting—to a sense of something like amazement. The fellow had not only done his homework—had caught the man’s unique combination of brilliance and warmth, humor and passion—he seemed to be channeling John Paul II. There were moments when it was a little disconcerting–a quick gesture here, or fleeting expression there that transported me back to the days when we followed the pope by television, on pilgrimage throughout the world. I not only forgot that my beloved Holy Father was being portrayed by an actor I didn’t much care for, I found myself spending the better part of the last portion of the film, which depicts the Pope’s painful struggle with Parkinson’s and his death on the eve of Mercy Sunday, 2005, weeping into wads of Kleenex. It simply all came back in a rush of emotion, and without unnecessary theatrical flourishes.
Young actors, take note: this is how it’s supposed to be done. I was not surprised, after I saw the film and did a bit of googling about the project, to learn that Voight had been nominated for an Emmy.
Pope John Paul II is not a “great” film and certainly not pathbreaking, even by television standards. The production values are very high, the settings and actors splendid, but it does not presume to take cinema into any startling new directions, nor render up stunning insights about one of the most important papacy’s in history. Instead, and quite properly, It serves up a high-quality hommage to a great man, and on this level it works superbly.
It also serves as a welcome reminder of the surprising gift which was the life of John Paul II. Holiness, especially the manner in which it comes, often comes as a surprise. This movie, largly by means of Jon Voight’s uncanny performance, does a remarkable job of depicting the surprising manner in which God’s grace worked through a unique personality in a time of crisis. As such I can heartily recommend this movie for the whole family.
Just keep that box of Kleenex close at hand.
