Holy Crap

I have just finished watching the ABC movie, “Have No Fear: The Life of Pope John Paul II.” Perhaps a more fitting title would have been “Have No Fear: It’s Almost Over.” Dry and quick, the movie is essentially a slide-show of the late Pontiff’s life, with small clips of his childhood quickly and arbitrarily jumping to his years under Nazi rule (take your eyes off the screen for more than a moment and you’ll miss it), then under Communist rule, than serving as Pope for the last hour. This rapidity make the closing montage of the film look silly.

Unlike such arguably good biopic films like NBC’s “Hitler,” (or the more recent German film, Der Untergang) HBO’s “Warm Springs” (about how a younger FDR deals with polio), or A&E’s “The Crossing” (about the famous battle of Trenton by Washington) which chose specific moments in the protagonists life in order to provide some perspective and humanity to its famous subjects, “Have No Fear” offer little in the way of perspective and thus suffers from the same problem A&E’s film about "Napoleon" suffered from: trying to do too much in too little time.

The problem is not Thomas Kretschmann, the German actor who played the title character, or even some of the sanctimonious inaccuracies (I don’t belief there is any evidence to suggest that the Pope threatened to resign his office if the Soviet Union invades Poland and if he truly reacted to the sex scandal the way the film portrays, it would have behooved him to be more public about it), but the fact that film lacked all of the depth and feel of a good film. In the end, you learn little about the character of this remarkable man and this is a tremendous pity. The life of the late Pope is so full of drama and danger, it is hard to imagine a movie making it boring and yet it does precisely that. Indeed, this is perhaps the only movie I have ever seen in which the film character actually seems more distant and impersonal than the real person whom he is portraying.

John Paul II was a great man who did great things and led an extraordinary life. On Sunday, Jon Voight will star in "Pope John Paul II" on NBC. I will probably see it if I have time but allow me to posit an early review: it was better than this one.