PADRE PIO - Mark Reviews Movies

Padre Pio, Gravitas Ventures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 1, 2023

It's called Padre Pio, but the friar and priest, canonized as a saint in the Catholic Church in 2002, seems of little consequence to the narrative of co-writer/director Abel Ferrara's movie. The man spends most of his time in seclusion in a monastery, having visions and battling his faults, while a town in Italy faces political turmoil in the immediate aftermath of the Great War.

Ferrara and co-screenwriter Mauirzio Braucci are clearly more invested in what's happening beyond the life and struggles of Padre Pio, played with one-note self-loathing by Shia LaBeouf. To be fair to the actor, there simply isn't much more for him to do here, because the filmmakers have made a movie of two very different stories.

They seem to hope that LaBeouf's quiet weeping, angry outbursts, and general mood of distress will be enough to communicate something about Pio. It doesn't, and in an even more confounding oversight, Ferrara never offers up a reason that the priest's story actually belongs in the wider narrative.

Most of that is invested in a rising political fight in the town of San Giovanni Rotondo, where soldiers are making a victorious but uncertain return from combat. In town, a group of intellectuals, led by Luigi (Vincenzo Crea), are debating how to bring about a shift toward socialism. It'll be either by way of revolution or the upcoming elections—the country's first free ones.

The screenplay establishes the disillusionment of people who have lost loved ones or come home wounded in the war and the almost feudalistic working conditions of the fields outside town. More and more people, veterans and widows and families who don't know of a relative's fate, begin to join the movement or find sympathy with it. The response of those in power is to ignore the rising sentiment as much as possible, until it becomes impossible to ignore.

The idea of this through line is fairly intriguing, although it's clearly hampered by the fact that Ferrara and Braucci have the priest's story with which to deal, as well. Things in town, then, unfold in a hasty, half-developed manner, but they do unfold, at least, which is more than be said of the other half of this tale.

There's very little sense of who Pio is, what he has done to essentially be exiled to this remote monastery (Some of the voices in his head speak of his relationships with women), and the significance of his struggle with guilt. That last part is in general, but it's also specifically in terms of how Pio's story figures into the political battle about to occur—one in which at least a local representative of the Catholic Church takes a side.

Padre Pio presents two separate kernels of stories potentially worth telling. Ferrara's approach, though, is so confused and unfocused as to render both of them hollow.

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