“A smile is the flower of the heart,” says Pope Francis, formerly Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, in Wim Wenders’s submissively celebratory docu-portrait. And Pope Francis does smile often: a very charming and forthright man with that capacity, noticed in other pontiffs, of combining twinkly eyed kindliness with spiritual firmness and candour. But access to the great man has clearly been provided with an undertaking not to challenge, not even to ask questions, in the normal interview sense.
Wenders’ movie outlines Francis’s much noticed attempt at a new liberalism and social engagement, rather different from the conservatism and paternalism of his two predecessors. Here is a pope who talks about poverty, unemployment, compassion for refugees and concern for the environment. Francis has a good line about the modern world and its “globalisation of indifference”. And it would be churlish to deploy the traditional sceptical point that the church is a rich and powerful entity and the pope has no serious intention of changing any of that, despite the humility and Franciscan austerity of his own personal approach to the trappings of office.
Wenders’ film is arguably valuable in that it shows Francis’s ethical and moral seriousness and it shows that his visits to the barrios, the prisons and the refugee camps have a passion lacking in secular politicians’ photo ops. They are often very moving. But this is an almost outrageously sugary, platitudinous film, like an ultra-glossy promotional video that might be shown on a loop in some tourist visitors centre associated with the Vatican. There is a very silly silent-movie-type reconstruction of scenes in the life of Saint Francis, whose name the pope adopted in office. It shows a single speech that Francis gave in 1999 in his pre-papal existence, but never talks about his family, his upbringing in Argentina, his attitude to his homeland’s troubled political past, or to the Society of Jesus – despite suggesting the importance of his being the first Jesuit pope. The film suggests that his supposed liberalism has ruffled conservative feathers but never wonders who precisely those conservatives are, or if they might have anything valid to say on camera.
And anyway: what liberalism? The pope thoughtfully says some emollient things about gay people and child abuse. But the pope is also shown saying that the “macho and feminist movements are of no use” – because they do not wish for integration. That specious moral equivalence is of “no use” in my view, like affecting to disapprove of both mammon and Christ equally because of their deplorable failure to get along. We don’t get to hear about Francis’s view on abortion and a woman’s right to choose. And most worryingly of all, Wenders has missed out the pope’s staggering comments on the Charlie Hebdo murders: “If my good friend Alberto Gasparri [his travel adviser] says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch. It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others.” Well, Mr Gasparri would naturally turn the other cheek if the pope punched him. But it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that the pope rather sympathises with this kind of murder. Perhaps it was an off-the-cuff remark that Francis now regrets. If Wenders had a bit more grit he would have asked the pope about this directly.
A strange film, then: his holiness is shown wisely counselling against proselytising when meeting people of other faiths. But this is a proselytising film, preaching to an imagined choir of believers, complaisant supporters and incurious well-wishers.
