Apart from the few but mighty completists of renegade filmmaker Abel Ferrara, the primary draw to watch “Padre Pio” is star Shia LaBeouf making his first on-screen attempt at a comeback after facing domestic abuse allegations. The star credits the film with prompting his conversion to Catholicism and helping to begin the process of repairing his life. Whatever catharsis the film prompted off-screen is not the territory of any review, but it’s notable that whatever transformation may have occurred in production finds little to no expression on screen.
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LaBeouf stars as the taciturn titular monk undergoing a crisis of faith as the Italian region around him endure a post-World War I crisis of government. While an occasional bout of screaming breaks up the monotony, the traditionally bombastic actor sulks in sullen silence for most of the movie as he battles his internal demons. His performance could be described as solemn if charitable – or somnambulate if brutally honest.
The film definitely represents a different strain of acting from LaBeouf, just not necessarily better. It’s no wonder he was attracted to a part like Padre Pio in the depths of his personal and professional despair. From the opening voiceover, the film proclaims the classically Christian insistence that joy can come out of suffering with enough time and patience. He does enough suffering and public penance in “Padre Pio,” even at one point enduring a naked run through the woods to quell his existential anguish. It may prove revelatory for both character and actor, yet it never transfers beyond that … if it registers at all.
Most of Pio’s spiritual doubt comes courtesy of the thematic template inhabited by the film. “Padre Pio” follows the lineage of sparse yet transcendental filmmakers like Dryer, Bresson, and Paul Schrader, who look for traces of the divine within absences and silences. Ferrara is no stranger to redemption arcs for tormented characters, having featured one prominently in his gritty 1992 moral drama “Bad Lieutenant.” He counts too much on these inspirations to provide illumination to “Padre Pio,” however, only vaguely tracing the conflicts of the central character. This is the light version of much heavier films.
“Padre Pio” also has the potency of its spiritual struggle diluted by the parallel plot unfolding in San Giovanni Rotondo. Ferrara does not hold back in showing the physical and emotional devastation inflicted on the town by the Great War. A particularly gasp-inducing sight occurs when someone appears to be hugging a returning soldier from a car, only for the moment to linger and reveal the true intention of the embrace. The wounded veteran has no legs and requires assistance to exit the automobile.
That nihilist disillusionment begins to find extreme strains as preparations for the first direct democratic elections in Italy get underway in 1920. A strain of socialist thinking sweeps the younger generation and causes tension with the military men in the town, who chide these aspiring revolutionaries. The well-established class who does not stand to gain status from such a political arrangement tells the budding socialists they need a life lesson … and everyone else in the town that they should fear the suggested change.
Italian history is, of course, full of overlap between matters of church and state. But in “Padre Pio,” the drama outside the walls of the monastery seems to hold only a tenuous connection to the fraught tension taking place within them. These sections are not necessarily bad, but they feel like an entirely different film forced to coexist within the structure of something else entirely. The townspeople are in a political thriller that’s clunkily crosscut within Pio’s quiet character study.
Elsewhere, “Padre Pio” features Asia Argento as a character credited only as “Tall Man,” a person who comes to the monastery for confession only to receive berating tirades at the hands of Pio. Argento is an even more complicated figure than the film’s headliner as both victim of Harvey Weinstein and an abuser of a minor. It’s not entirely clear what she’s doing here or why her character cuts across the gender divide. But her appearance only furthers the impression that the film exists primarily as a rehabilitation vehicle for its troubled actors. If these two think salvation is hard-fought in Ferrara’s film, they should brace themselves for the outside world. [C-]
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