Alejandro Monteverde's latest film, the extremely profitable Christian thriller »Sound of freedom,” was dogged by accusations that its anti-trafficking hero was himself guilty of fraud and manipulation – a tough break for a piece of conspiracy-driven MAGA theology that purported to shine a light on the secret cabal of sex criminals who hide in plain sight. Monteverde probably had no way of knowing that Tim Ballard would become the target of a criminal investigation and being ousted from the very organization that “Sound of Freedom” exists to promote (the movie was filmed in the summer of 2018, five years before its eventual release and subsequent trials), but its follow-up feature film – shot in 2021 – seems designed to avoid any hint of a similar controversy.
Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini may not have been as pure and perfect a soul as the Monteverde biopic imagines, but the director can rest easy knowing that his new subject is a literal saint. At this point, more than a century after Cabrini's death, it's safe to assume that a section on “allegations of sexual misconduct” is unlikely to be added to his Wikipedia page soon (current titles include “Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” “Veneration” and “Sanctuaries”).
So “Cabrini” at least has this advantage, and the pay-it-forward system which Angel Studios uses to boost the film's box office revenue — the secret to its success “Sound of Freedom” — won't look as much like a QAnon engagement campaign this time. I hope Monteverde can take solace in this, because the inherent virtue of his latest film is about the only virtue he possesses. This is the crisis facing a “faith-based” cinema that struggles to find the middle ground between Joel Osteen and Infowars: people are sinners, but saints are boring as hell.
A heavy, histrionic and incredibly boring biopic that runs over 140 minutes despite being thinner than a stained glass window, “Cabrini” tells the true but coma-inducing story of a woman who refused to accept a ” no” as the answer. – even when this response came directly from the Pope. In theory, this sounds like a solid basis for a historical drama. In practice, this looks like what might happen if you asked an AI to render “nevertheless, she persisted” in the style of “The Godfather II.” Its dialogue is a jumble of meaningless slogans in search of a character to support them, its cinematography smothers turn-of-the-century New York under a mustard cloud of digital sepia, and its structure – attributed to both Monteverde and to screenwriter Rod Barr – is so lacking in convincing form that it might as well be a person with three arms Or a t-shirt that has only one sleeves.
We meet the future saint when she was still Maria Francesca Cabrini, an Italian nun in her thirties played by an inflexible and stoic Cristiana Dell'Anna. It's 1887 and Cabrini keeps spamming the Vatican asking to allow him to establish a mission in China. Finally summoned to Rome by a cardinal who begs him to unsubscribe from his mailing list (“stay in your place, mother”), Cabrini insists on speaking to her manager, and that's how she finds herself sitting opposite of Pope Leo XIII (Giancarlo Giannini!). Impressed by the nun's audacity, the pope allows her to become the first woman to oversee a foreign order, but with two major caveats: She will go to California, not China, and will do so knowing that the Church may never allow women a second chance if it fails.
Rebel that she is, Cabrini decides instead to build her “empire of hope” in Manhattan. This is where most of his fellow Italian immigrants arrive in America, and also where they face the most discrimination. Cabrini doesn't know the half of it: most of the Italians she meets in this film can't walk 10 feet without getting spit on by a cop or worse, and the prologue sets the tone for the film following a young boy so as he pushed his dying mother through the streets in a cart, searching in vain for a hospital that could care for strangers like them.
Rarely has an island been so desperately in need of an orphanage, but creating one will be a tall order in a town whose mayor is a cigar-chomping Batman villain who considers every dead immigrant a personal accomplishment (John Lithgow plays the fictional Mayor Gould). , the outspoken liberal actor clearly enjoying his chance to play a caricature of our modern day villains). Cabrini perhaps has better luck with Archbishop Corrigan (David Morse, always able to divine the texture of even the flattest roles), gentler than he seems, but he only allows him to solicit help. money from the same penniless community she is trying to save. .
And yet, despite all this outward discrimination, Cabrini's biggest obstacle might be his own body. Born two months early and told as a child that she would be bedridden for the rest of her life, Cabrini has been dedicated to proving men wrong ever since. She arrived in America with a cough so bad that a kind doctor told her that she had only two or three years to live and that anything else would require a miracle, but “it would take a miracle” is religious language of the movie theater. because “that's 100% what's going to happen”, and so it's no surprise that she still hasn't succumbed to an old illness at the end of this film (spoiler alert: Cabrini died from malaria at age 67 while wrapping Christmas presents for local children at a Chicago hospital, because saints will remain saints until the end).
Nothing else is likely to slow her down, which might explain why this epic drama barely has enough conflict to sustain a “Family Circus” cartoon. Time and time again, Cabrini faces an ill-defined challenge to her mission; Time and time again, she responds by staring into the distance with a clenched jaw and spouting jargon like “The world is too small for what I intend to do.”
As if the struggle were unworthy of a future saint, Monteverde's biopic removes all obstacles until it barely registers on screen (this is not a film where nothing happens, but it certainly is), and even the most fundamental tenets of Cabrini's goal become as difficult to understand as the threats made against him. One minute she's rescuing stray animals from the sewers beneath Five Points, and the next she's digging wells for the Sacred Heart Orphan Asylum that she founds in the wilds of West Park. “I’ll be buried here,” Cabrini tells the camera, this awkwardly prescient line arriving in the middle of a film so long and empty that I feared it would force me to watch her get buried in real time.
Rather than taint its heroine with its own tension, Barr's script entrusts most of the drama to the film's disposable supporting cast, who include a sex worker with a heart of gold (winner Romana Maggiora Vergano) and a kid of the streets who finds a loaded gun that he is not afraid to use. These people have their own problems, but Cabrini is happy to float in the air right above them, her black dress still an inch or two off the ground as if suspended by the unwavering golden wail of Gene Back's orchestral score.
Other characters question Cabrini's pathological dedication (even the Pope warns that he can't tell where Cabrini's faith ends and his ambition begins), but there's never a chip in the veneer. divine of the nun; she simply shows up wherever she's needed, ignores the men who tell her to sit down, and does what's necessary to serve a purpose so poorly fleshed out by this film that it begins to feel like a victim of its own perseverance. “Cabrini” offers a portrait of its namesake as beautiful and sterile as the world it creates around it, and while I didn’t expect the guy who directed “Sound of Freedom” to make a movie As subversive as “Simon of the Desert” or “The Gospel According to Matthew,” the stainless inertia of Monteverde's biopic cannot help but severely dilute the power of Cabrini's humanist message.
It is as if “Cabrini” was trying to separate the Christian ideals of the saint's teachings from the political realities of their practice; as if he were trying to flatter the moral principles of his conservative audience without pushing that audience to embody them. Simply scan the QR code in the credits, pay for a few movie tickets in advance, and let the hard work of solving anti-immigration discrimination become someone else's problem. “We can serve our weakness,” Cabrini says, “or we can serve our purpose.” Cabrini's willingness to choose one over the other is why she ultimately became a saint. Monteverde's refusal to make his audience do the same is why he became Angel Studios' signature auteur.
Grade: C-
Lionsgate will release “Cabrini” in theaters on Friday, March 8.