KIDNAPPED (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Kidnapped, Cohen Media Group

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 23, 2024

On the night of June 23, 1858, a group of men entered the home of the Mortara family in Bologna, Italy—then part of the Papal States, under the rule of Pope Pius IX. They checked the names of each family member off a list, ensuring that everyone was present in the house, and then, the man in charge announced he would be taking the family's 6-year-old son. Some more men spent the night in the house, to make sure the boy remained, and the following day, the child was forcibly removed from the home, put into a carriage, and transported to Rome.

That's the beginning of Kidnapped, based on a true story, and by any reasonable measure, the description of this act matches the title of co-writer/director Marco Bellocchio's film. What is reason, though, in the face of religious dogma, especially when it's perceived as an absolute, incontrovertible truth and enacted by the highest powers of a state?

At this time and in this place, the taking of Edgardo Mortara was not technically a crime. It was perfectly legal, and indeed, the act was one ordained by the law of the Catholic Church, which governed a significant portion of the Italian peninsula at that time.

Part of the local governance of Bologna was an inquisitor, much like the Spanish ones of such infamy, whose role was to put an end to "heresies" against the Church and make certain Catholic law was upheld. In this regard, the Mortara case, as it came to be known around the world as word of the child's abduction spread, fell under both parameters of the local inquisitor's job.

The Mortara family was Jewish, a fact that was barely tolerated by the official law of the church-state, and the inquisitor had been informed that the child, when he was an infant, had been secretly baptized by a housekeeper. As such, the boy needed to be raised as a Christian under the law, and since his family obviously would do no such thing, young Edgardo became an official ward of the state and, by extension, the Catholic Church.

All of this is recorded history. The strength of Bellocchio's film is that it sticks to the facts, elevates them by way of intentionally high melodrama (admittedly too lofty at times), and finds the tragic contradictions offered by a crime that, while clearly one by any metric of basic humanity, could not be stopped, prosecuted, or corrected by any one person or official body.

It's also notable how Bellocchio and Susanna Nicchiarelli's screenplay (based on Daniele Scalise's non-fiction book) evolves its aims as this harrowing narrative progresses. At first, they're entirely emotional, as the boy's family suffer such an egregious act against them and find no means within or outside the system to resolve it in their favor, while a young boy must face isolation from his family and brainwashing in his new "home." As the case becomes more complicated by the shifting politics of the region and the effects of the Church's influence on the boy, the film's approach becomes more intellectual.

The main players here are divided into sides. With the family are the boy's father Salomone (Fausto Russo Alesi) and mother Marianna (Barbara Ronchi), and even they are divided as a result of the sanctioned kidnapping of their son. Salomone wants to take an official and proper path toward retrieving the child, stopping himself from tossing the boy out a window to a gathered crowd when the police first arrive at the family's home. Marianna believes it isn't enough, but neither parent has any idea how to confront such power directly.

On the other side is the Church, represented by Fr. Gaetano Feletti (Fabrizio Gifuni), Bologna's inquisitor and the man who eventually has to make the Vatican's case when it's questioned, and Pope Pius IX himself, played by Paolo Pierobon in a performance that's just shy of the villain from an old-fashioned melodrama. It's the right choice, perhaps, if only because the film itself portrays him as a man entrenched in, obsessed with, and certain of worldly power that there is nothing spiritual or even decent remaining in him. Bellocchio suggests a kind of madness within this pope, in one scene in which he sees critical cartoons of him springing to life, and a fear of losing that control, mainly in a nightmare in which Pius imagines a group of rabbis performing a religious ritual on him.

Caught in the middle is Edgardo, played as a child by Enea Sala and older—although it's best not to say how much older—by Leonardo Maltese. Through all of the efforts on the part of the family—petitioning newspapers to cover what happened and seeking the help of a Jewish council in Rome—and the tactics employed by the Church to make Edgardo's "conversion" beyond question, the film never loses sight of the plain fact that Edgardo is a child, learning by example and basically clinging to whatever or whoever is right in front of him at the moment. That's what makes the case especially insidious, as the Church molds this young mind in ways that leave him confused and defenseless with only one way of thinking on to which to latch.

That's the real tragedy of Kidnapped, embodied by a haunting epilogue at some point in the future after any official case in regards to the abduction has come to a close. We may be watching an older Edgardo, but in the way he reflexively joins a mob and instantly falls back on his stolen upbringing, there's no difference between his older self and the child it seems he will always be.

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