The Pope's Exorcist (2023) - FILM FREAK CENTRAL (2024)

½*/****
starring Russell Crowe, Daniel Zovatto, Alex Essoe, Franco Nero
screenplay by Michael Petroni and Evan Spiliotopoulos
directed by Julius Avery

by Walter Chaw Right off the bat, I feel I must warn you that no popes are exorcised in this film. The prospect of Russell Crowe reading the rites over a levitating, pea-soup spewing Franco Nero, shuttled in to play the Pope in Julius Avery’s The Pope’s Exorcist, is incredibly juicy, so I get why they would attempt to mislead audiences in this way, but it’s terribly dishonest. The cruellest blow, however, is that in place of Franco Nero in his dotage doing a spider-walk downstairs and pissing himself in his papal robes before a drunken astronaut (which, let’s face it, once I hit 82, I can’t promise that won’t just be a Tuesday), we get Crowe, as real-life exorcist Father Gabriel Amorth, riding a Vespa through the streets of Rome, no doubt in search of an espresso, a gelato, spaghetti, and his portly, Vespa-riding twin for the Guinness Book photo shoot. It bears mentioning, too, how Crowe straps on the world’s most offensive Mario Bros. accent to free poor little Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) from demonic possession. Why is Henry in Rome? Because his mom, Julia (Alex Essoe), is renovating a building, which happens to be the primary reason anyone moves to Italy. (See also: Donald Sutherland’s character in Don’t Look Now and Genevieve Bujold’s character in Obsession and Diane Lane’s character in Under the Tuscan Sun.) There’s probably a piece to be written about how our perception of Italy is of a beautiful place the Italians have neglected, but now that P.J. O’Rourke, who once wrote, “Italy is not a third world country but nobody told the Italians,” is dead, I don’t know who’ll write it.

As Crowe plays him, Amorth is an avuncular grizzly bear spawned in the holy union of G.K. Chesterton and Father Guido Sarducci. In a prologue set in some dirtwater hovel, the good Father plays Jesus’s greatest hits and, in a sick cover of Matthew 8:28-34, casts a demon out of a dude and into a pig. Don’t threaten me with a good time, amiright? Alas, rather than provide a few moments of demonic-hog-amuck awesomeness, the film immediately executes the pig, right there in the bedroom. The Pope’s Exorcist, in other words, is chaotic, but it isn’t fun. It’s so against fun, whenever it approaches fun it bounces off it like a negatively-polarized magnet. Little meat puppet Henry has a rebellious sis, Amy (Laurel Marsden), who is, like, so over it from the start, like, totally. Moody, goth, painting her toenails black while listening to her Walkman (it’s 1987, dork–like, I’m so serious) and throwing double birds at mom behind her back when she says something totally lame. I kid. I kid because Amy doesn’t really talk like a teenager from the 1980s, because that would’ve been rad; The Pope’s Exorcist, along the way to not being fun, isn’t rad, bodacious, or choice, either. I will say the first shot of Amorth zipping along on his tiny bike is scored to Faith No More‘s “We Care A Lot,” which…get it? Faith no more? Goddamn, that’s clever. Except Father Amorth isn’t having a crisis of faith, thus this shout-out seems to be an acknowledgement of how a trope of exorcism movies since The Exorcist‘s hound-eyed Father Karras has been the hero priest suffering a crisis of faith. I’m not sure anyone involved in this thing knew how to go about it without leaning on every crutch of the subgenre, so there it is.

Anyway, Henry gets possessed, and some buried sexytime stuff gets unearthed from Amorth’s history as well as the pants–I mean, past–of assistant/apprentice Father Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto), leading to the standard warning, pre-exorcism, of not listening to what the creature says and, by all means, not responding to it. Esquibel listens and responds–of course he does, mainly, I think, because Father Amorth appears to be listening and judging. I have to say that a Catholic Priest having guilty thoughts about pretty women is a lot less current and scandalous than a Catholic Priest having guilty thoughts about kids–meaning that given the Church’s anger towards this film’s inaccuracies regarding details of the real-life Father Amorth, you might as well have gone all-in and been accurate about the Catholic Church’s disturbing track record of nursing pedophiles to its sanctimonious breast. In this climate, with what we know and are reminded of seemingly on a weekly basis, Father Esquibel thinking about ladies and maybe abusing his power to get a kiss actually plays as Catholic propaganda. My priest has interests in a partner his age and hasn’t been transferred to a dozen parishes to escape his reputation for pederasty? Progress!

For the rest of it, it’s fetishism of child abuse, essentially, with little Henry becoming alarmingly thin and generally put through it up until a Paul W.S. Anderson movie set in a dungeon breaks out, complete with those stretchy-mouth effects that make me nuts because there’s no way that’s happening without the mouth splitting, even if we can rationalize the jaw dislocating. I don’t love in The Exorcist when Regan’s head spins around, either, though at least there you could say the demon probably broke her neck, and so, you know, demons be bad; all this consequence-free, CGI distortion of the human body reduces these films to cartoons. Watching The Pope’s Exorcist, it occurred to me that part of the reason Crowe took this role probably had to do with how he gets to wear a thick, black smock throughout–a Brando-as-Kurtz gambit to preserve vanity through the clever employment of shadow. But Brando got to recite Eliot: Crowe only gets to “Mama mia!” his way through this ignoble trash while not exorcising Franco Nero. There’s always the sequel.