The Pope's Exorcist
From conception, this film was always going to be fighting an uphill battle. For one, it necessarily features the Catholic Church, and its main character is a priest. At least in the US, the Church’s reputation has never recovered after the clergy sexual abuse scandal was uncovered in Boston in 2002, and triggered the discovery of similar abuses across the rest of the country and many other parts of the world. New related scandals were uncovered in the Baltimore Archdiocese the day before the film’s international release. So a film in which a priest portrayed as upstanding is the hero is a tough sell. Not to mention that standard exorcism movies don’t tend to succeed in recent years: they’re either well regarded but not popular, or widely know and considered crap.
Modern exorcism movies either need to find a way to make demonic possession where they’re stuck in bed scary again (like The Exorcist), or else add other elements to keep it interesting. Clearly the latter is the easier task, and the one The Pope’s Exorcist goes for. But it’s not a guarantee of success.
Gabriele Amorth (Russell Crowe) is a priest responsible for carrying out exorcisms on behalf of the Vatican, where he’s the Chief Exorcist. His role brings him to Spain, where an American family has moved into an abbey undergoing renovations, and whose son has taken ill. He has the standard possessed person look: cracked skin, covered in varicose veins bulging black against the skin, and intense lizard like eyes. But something’s different about this one; he has far more power than he should, especially considering he’s supposedly in a house of God…
The only interesting thing to note about the setup is that he seems to be skeptical of most claimed possessions. When called to a small village, he has questions for the family, and then appears to be testing the possessed boy. When he later appears in front of a council in he Vatican, he explains to them that 98% of “possessions” are just temporary insanity or some other mental health condition, and so the proper treatment is to make them feel like you’ve cast out some spirit without doing proper rites.
Not that the council matters, or his conviction that most possessions aren’t. They’re just kind of there in order to heighten the drama without mattering all that much. Sure, the boy’s demon tries to use his guilt about a woman he failed to save which relates to this question, but it just as easily could have been anything else. And honestly, maybe giving him a true character flaw would have made him more compelling.
What is a strength of the movie is his investigation of what’s going on. Gabriele is confused by such a powerful demon possessing such an inconsequential boy; usually, that’s reserved for smaller, less important spirits. So there' must be more to it. He noticed some sort of tomb in the yard with the seal of the Vatican on it, and finds a vault in the basement with the mark of the Spanish Inquisition. Unsurprisingly, it’s here where both the avenue for these events and demon’s plan become clear.
Russell Crowe does a great job playing this character. He has a fantastic natural screen presence and a dignity afforded to him by being middle-aged and stone-faced. He always feels authoritative and in control, even when he’s not. And his Italian accent when speaking English sounds great to my ear (maybe some native Italian speakers will correct me). I also appreciate that he speaks Italian mostly, unless he has some reason to speak English, such as with another character where it’s their only common language.
But the problem is basically everything around him. The family isn’t very well written or acted, the possession itself is rote, the camera work is nothing special, and the full intent of the demon’s plan isn’t very clear. I guess it’s implied, but not how it would actually go down. The dialog is pretty meh, and the forced drama mentioned earlier is silly. The way the demon speaks is hilarious, calling him Gabe and repeating that he’s going to fuck Gabe. I’m not sure it’s supposed to be, as this mostly isn’t a funny movie, although it does have its moments. There’s also that the possession seems to have further effects than make any sense; why does the Pope fall ill seemingly in time with some of the demon’s minor victories?
There’s one other issue I need to mention. It’s not a huge problem with the narrative per se, but it’s a huge problem with the movie, especially in light of the near constant scandals in the modern Church.
Heads up: Minor spoiler ahead!
Okay, so they’re going through the vault, trying to find the demon’s name so they can exert more power over it. And they come across a skeleton on a throne, which Gabriele identifies as a famous exorcist who helped start the Spanish Inquisition. He concludes that the exorcist must have been possessed, which means the Spanish Inquisition was actually the work of the Devil, not the work of the Church.
Are you kidding me? Fuck that. The Spanish Inquisition was a horrible period in the Church’s (and humanity’s) history, driven by zealotry and racism and distrust of others. It was characterized by brutality and torture and dehumanization of those deemed the “other”. And it was the doing of people. Of flawed people who far too easily convinced themselves they were doing God’s work. We’ve seen atrocities similar in nature (albeit not scope) committed by the Church and its actors in the 2000 years it’s been around. To claim it was brought about by someone under the control of the Devil is to let the Church off the hook, to absolve them of their wrongdoing. Which is despicable.
All in all, this is not a very good movie, and contains within it an angering absolution of the Church for some of its many sins. So maybe don’t go see it.