The Devil and Father Amorth
My hope for The Pope's Exorcist before I watched it was that Russell Crowe's instantly-legendary spicy meat-a-ball of an "Italian" accent would remain amusing throughout the film's 103-minute length. This was akin to hoping, upon starting a trip to Yosemite, that you'd see some large trees: you'd get what you wanted even more than you expected to and also you weren't asking for nearly enough. This is a singular treasure trove of loopy, dizzying nonsense, one that manages a rare and splendid feat for any movie, good or bad: it keeps adding more of itself all throughout its running time. No matter how much zany wackadoo bullshit you think it has flung at you, it still finds surprises and ways to remain fresh and unpredictable, quite literally up until the very last scene.
But also, yes: respected Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe has seemingly studied for the role of Father Gabriele Amorth, an infamously cantankerous weirdo who wrote multiple books about all the exorcisms he'd performed and all the demons he'd encountered over his long career as one of the most controversial men in contemporary Catholicism, by intently playing through every game in the Super Mario franchise. That is the gateway drug to the hedonistic pleasures found all throughout The Pope's Exorcist: listening to Crowe explore with utmost gravity and psychological shading a character that he has also decided should be treated like a gaudy hate crime against all the peoples of the northern Mediterranean. Because that's the really weird thing, it is a good performance - like, good in a conventional sense, I mean. There are many little nuances where you can see the actor's character work: offbeat gestures, winks, unexpected shifts in the rhythm of a line delivery. He has worked his way into Father Amorth's head, or at least the version of Father Amorth that screenwriters Michael Petroni and Evan Spiliotopoulos have extracted from the real-life man's books (story credit goes to R. Dean McCreary & Chester Hastings and Jeff Katz, and I have to say, five credited authors seems like a lot for a story in such a boilerplate subgenre as the exorcism movie), and from what he found there concocted a squirmy mixture of breezy self-confidence - moreso than just about any movie exorcist I can immediately call to mind, Crowe's Fr. Amorth offers little or no indication that he thinks the demon he's dealing with this time around might win, God self-evidently wouldn't allow that - and the gnawing guilt of a man who, perhaps because he is so self-confident, can't escape from the knowledge of the times he has fucked up and failed to prevent suffering that he was in principle able to stop.
That's basically the same backstory as every single exorcism movie since The Exorcist pinned down all the rules of the genre in 1973, and The Pope's Exorcist is following the rulebook. Inasmuch as it freshens up the formula - and I actually think it does, quite a bit; I would be so reckless as to say that I think this is the most watchable American-made exorcism movie of the 21st Century, unless we count Drag Me to Hell as an example of the form - it does not do so by changing things, but by adding. And what it adds is routinely nonsensical: I think you could fairly describe this as what happens when you combine an exorcism movie with National Treasure, in that the solution to the demonic possession involves finding secret puzzle chambers deep below the surface of the earth, behind seals left centuries ago by the Spanish Inquisition. And then you flavor the resultant mixture with some Harry Potter, between the climactic light-beam fight with the role of magic wands here played by crucifixes, and the role of Dumbledore being filled by no less a personage than His Holiness the bishop of Rome, the Pope himself. Who also gets a bit of Obi-Wan action in there; at one point he is incapacitated after feeling a great disturbance in the Holy Spirit, or I don't even know what the fuck was going on in the combined brains of the five writers. The Pope's Exorcist, like all exorcism movies, assumes the accuracy of Roman Catholic doctrine, and like some exorcism movies, rather blatantly wants to serve as an apologia for the Church's checkered history (specifically that selfsame Spanish Inquisition, which gets dragged into the conflict in an exciting wrongheaded way), but it also doesn't seem to take the Church, or Christianity at all, remotely seriously. The thing it most reminded me of was the thing that happens in Japanese animation that heavily pulls from Christian iconography, where you can tell that the creators understand that in some part of the world, there are people who treat this stuff as the central aspect of their religion and how they understand the world, but it's not like any of them are going to watch this, so we don't need to worry about getting the details right. And besides, we don't know what the details are in the first place. The degree to which the film wants to be taken seriously as a story of actual events performed by an actual Church official can be succinctly demonstrated by noting that this film takes place very specifically in 1987, a date pinned down multiple times, when on our Earth Pope John-Paul II was the first non-Italian to hold that role in some 450 years; in The Pope's Exorcist, the pontiff is played by '60s and '70s Italian genre film legend Franco Nero, who has furthermore elected to match Crowe's nutsoid accent work by acting like a caricature of his own nationality.
For that, above all other things, is what The Pope's Exorcist is primarily adding to the staid recipe of the exorcism film: it's silly. And I refuse to think that it's silly through incompetence. It's entirely possible that director Julius Avery had every intention of making a sober-minded genre film that took this raving crackpot's memoirs wholly seriously (and it's just as possible that he didn't, of course), but it's not conceivable that he thought he could continue to execute this plan after even a brief exposure to Crowe's performance. This is, in the most literal sense of the word, a winking movie: Crowe is taking Fr. Amorth seriously, but he's not taking the boilerplate matter of an exorcism movie seriously, and he's letting the character barrel through the genre tropes with a downright jolly attitude towards his job. Amorth cracks jokes, roles his eyes, lets innuendo slide by with a kind of resigned smirk: when I said earlier that the film doesn't present the character as consumed with doubts that the demon might win, it's because the movie treats this as a the story of a man with a good attitude about his tedious desk job. The demon won't win any more than a recalcitrant Excel spreadsheet might "win": the problem is that the demon, like the spreadsheet, could very well be completely miserable to deal with until it goes away.
To frame this in more grounded terms: I think it's pretty clear from watching it that the people who made The Pope's Exorcist know that movies about exorcisms are unbelievably tired; not even the venerable slasher movie is such an ossified form. There have been essentially no innovations worth speaking of since The Exorcist wrote the rulebook, unless you count 2008's Chronicle of an Exorcism and 2010's The Last Exorcism adding found-footage to the mix, and that's pretty thin stuff. And I'm not actually crediting The Pope's Exorcist with doing so; making the exorcist an '80s cop movie "loose cannon" type isn't an innovation, it's a desperation gambit. What I am credit the filmmakers with doing is recognising that the story they're telling is coated in moss and mummy dust, and rather than expect that they can trick us into taking it seriously, they've decided to just make a movie that's, like, fun to watch. Radical stuff. And the primary way they've made it fun is by treating it with a certain sense of camp, or kitschiness, or irony, or something: it's not smug and superior, at any rate. But it's in a playful mood, and that playful mood translates to things like "sure, Fr. Amorth can ride a Vespa literally everywhere" and "well obviously the possessed little boy will hack up a dead bird and present it like a proud kitten" and "the climax should absolutely include some blood-soaked slapstick violence played by some blatantly cartoony CGI". It involves having cinematographer Khalid Mohtaseb go full-on Universal Pictures B-movie in lighting every single space like a carnival haunted house, and shooting this Spanish-set story in Ireland; probably for tax purposes or some such thing, but the practical effect is for all of the exteriors to have decidedly un-Spanish levels of wet, grey, overcast skies, the better to feel creepy in an unfocused but persistent way. And it certainly involves the spectacular narrative excess of the last five minutes, when the movie decides that however ludicrous it has been thus far, it can be so much more ludicrous in planting the hooks not merely for a sequel, but a whole-ass franchise. If the movie is right that there is a God, I pray that in His wisdom He'll give us as many of those sequels as possible, because this movie is a blast.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
But also, yes: respected Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe has seemingly studied for the role of Father Gabriele Amorth, an infamously cantankerous weirdo who wrote multiple books about all the exorcisms he'd performed and all the demons he'd encountered over his long career as one of the most controversial men in contemporary Catholicism, by intently playing through every game in the Super Mario franchise. That is the gateway drug to the hedonistic pleasures found all throughout The Pope's Exorcist: listening to Crowe explore with utmost gravity and psychological shading a character that he has also decided should be treated like a gaudy hate crime against all the peoples of the northern Mediterranean. Because that's the really weird thing, it is a good performance - like, good in a conventional sense, I mean. There are many little nuances where you can see the actor's character work: offbeat gestures, winks, unexpected shifts in the rhythm of a line delivery. He has worked his way into Father Amorth's head, or at least the version of Father Amorth that screenwriters Michael Petroni and Evan Spiliotopoulos have extracted from the real-life man's books (story credit goes to R. Dean McCreary & Chester Hastings and Jeff Katz, and I have to say, five credited authors seems like a lot for a story in such a boilerplate subgenre as the exorcism movie), and from what he found there concocted a squirmy mixture of breezy self-confidence - moreso than just about any movie exorcist I can immediately call to mind, Crowe's Fr. Amorth offers little or no indication that he thinks the demon he's dealing with this time around might win, God self-evidently wouldn't allow that - and the gnawing guilt of a man who, perhaps because he is so self-confident, can't escape from the knowledge of the times he has fucked up and failed to prevent suffering that he was in principle able to stop.
That's basically the same backstory as every single exorcism movie since The Exorcist pinned down all the rules of the genre in 1973, and The Pope's Exorcist is following the rulebook. Inasmuch as it freshens up the formula - and I actually think it does, quite a bit; I would be so reckless as to say that I think this is the most watchable American-made exorcism movie of the 21st Century, unless we count Drag Me to Hell as an example of the form - it does not do so by changing things, but by adding. And what it adds is routinely nonsensical: I think you could fairly describe this as what happens when you combine an exorcism movie with National Treasure, in that the solution to the demonic possession involves finding secret puzzle chambers deep below the surface of the earth, behind seals left centuries ago by the Spanish Inquisition. And then you flavor the resultant mixture with some Harry Potter, between the climactic light-beam fight with the role of magic wands here played by crucifixes, and the role of Dumbledore being filled by no less a personage than His Holiness the bishop of Rome, the Pope himself. Who also gets a bit of Obi-Wan action in there; at one point he is incapacitated after feeling a great disturbance in the Holy Spirit, or I don't even know what the fuck was going on in the combined brains of the five writers. The Pope's Exorcist, like all exorcism movies, assumes the accuracy of Roman Catholic doctrine, and like some exorcism movies, rather blatantly wants to serve as an apologia for the Church's checkered history (specifically that selfsame Spanish Inquisition, which gets dragged into the conflict in an exciting wrongheaded way), but it also doesn't seem to take the Church, or Christianity at all, remotely seriously. The thing it most reminded me of was the thing that happens in Japanese animation that heavily pulls from Christian iconography, where you can tell that the creators understand that in some part of the world, there are people who treat this stuff as the central aspect of their religion and how they understand the world, but it's not like any of them are going to watch this, so we don't need to worry about getting the details right. And besides, we don't know what the details are in the first place. The degree to which the film wants to be taken seriously as a story of actual events performed by an actual Church official can be succinctly demonstrated by noting that this film takes place very specifically in 1987, a date pinned down multiple times, when on our Earth Pope John-Paul II was the first non-Italian to hold that role in some 450 years; in The Pope's Exorcist, the pontiff is played by '60s and '70s Italian genre film legend Franco Nero, who has furthermore elected to match Crowe's nutsoid accent work by acting like a caricature of his own nationality.
For that, above all other things, is what The Pope's Exorcist is primarily adding to the staid recipe of the exorcism film: it's silly. And I refuse to think that it's silly through incompetence. It's entirely possible that director Julius Avery had every intention of making a sober-minded genre film that took this raving crackpot's memoirs wholly seriously (and it's just as possible that he didn't, of course), but it's not conceivable that he thought he could continue to execute this plan after even a brief exposure to Crowe's performance. This is, in the most literal sense of the word, a winking movie: Crowe is taking Fr. Amorth seriously, but he's not taking the boilerplate matter of an exorcism movie seriously, and he's letting the character barrel through the genre tropes with a downright jolly attitude towards his job. Amorth cracks jokes, roles his eyes, lets innuendo slide by with a kind of resigned smirk: when I said earlier that the film doesn't present the character as consumed with doubts that the demon might win, it's because the movie treats this as a the story of a man with a good attitude about his tedious desk job. The demon won't win any more than a recalcitrant Excel spreadsheet might "win": the problem is that the demon, like the spreadsheet, could very well be completely miserable to deal with until it goes away.
To frame this in more grounded terms: I think it's pretty clear from watching it that the people who made The Pope's Exorcist know that movies about exorcisms are unbelievably tired; not even the venerable slasher movie is such an ossified form. There have been essentially no innovations worth speaking of since The Exorcist wrote the rulebook, unless you count 2008's Chronicle of an Exorcism and 2010's The Last Exorcism adding found-footage to the mix, and that's pretty thin stuff. And I'm not actually crediting The Pope's Exorcist with doing so; making the exorcist an '80s cop movie "loose cannon" type isn't an innovation, it's a desperation gambit. What I am credit the filmmakers with doing is recognising that the story they're telling is coated in moss and mummy dust, and rather than expect that they can trick us into taking it seriously, they've decided to just make a movie that's, like, fun to watch. Radical stuff. And the primary way they've made it fun is by treating it with a certain sense of camp, or kitschiness, or irony, or something: it's not smug and superior, at any rate. But it's in a playful mood, and that playful mood translates to things like "sure, Fr. Amorth can ride a Vespa literally everywhere" and "well obviously the possessed little boy will hack up a dead bird and present it like a proud kitten" and "the climax should absolutely include some blood-soaked slapstick violence played by some blatantly cartoony CGI". It involves having cinematographer Khalid Mohtaseb go full-on Universal Pictures B-movie in lighting every single space like a carnival haunted house, and shooting this Spanish-set story in Ireland; probably for tax purposes or some such thing, but the practical effect is for all of the exteriors to have decidedly un-Spanish levels of wet, grey, overcast skies, the better to feel creepy in an unfocused but persistent way. And it certainly involves the spectacular narrative excess of the last five minutes, when the movie decides that however ludicrous it has been thus far, it can be so much more ludicrous in planting the hooks not merely for a sequel, but a whole-ass franchise. If the movie is right that there is a God, I pray that in His wisdom He'll give us as many of those sequels as possible, because this movie is a blast.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Categories: exorcising, good bad movies, horror, the dread biopic
