‘The Two Popes’ Is Too Much
Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce star in a prestige drama about powerful old men pontificating
The new Netflix movie The Two Popes was too far-fetched for me to believe. And the Bishop of Rome — the Vicar of Christ, the pontifex maximus, His Holiness — is a fantastical character to begin with. The Pope is the closest thing humans have to a wizard. The hat, the robes the staff. The Pope lives in a castle, casts spells, and is guarded by outlandishly dressed mercenaries called Swiss Guards. The Pope looks like someone who can shoot lightning bolts from his large magic ring.
I just can’t buy that the Pope, either Benedict or Francis, is a sensitive and humble man of God with interesting things to say. He’s just patriarchy upper-management, nothing more.
Yet The Two Popes insists that the main characters, a pair of elderly men, are clever and eloquent and not a couple of career bureaucrats who help run an ancient and lucrative international religious business with 1.2 billion regular customers and real estate holdings in Rome, New York, and Paris, to name a few.
The Catholic Church is also an organization that used its vast treasure and influence to whitewash decades of predatory sexual crimes by its employees, hundreds of which preyed on thousands of…
