Aside from the title of this article sounding like the beginning of a joke (two popes and a pharmacist walk into a bar…) I have to say that I’ve been quite lucky in picking the right stuff to watch lately.
Last week was Molly’s Game and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, this week is the Two Popes and the Pharmacist, both available on Netflix.
The Two Popes has been on my watch list for awhile now. I wasn’t all that interested in putting it on (no explosions, guns or gratuitous shots of nudity) but I’m glad I did because its my favorite film of the year.
Two Popes is “inspired by true events” which took place around the time Pope Benedict decided to step down from the papacy and Pope Francis assumed it. This period is filled with tension and drama and is a great place to center a story around.
I have to confess, I never did like Pope Benedict. I’ve always thought he looked like the evil Emperor in Star Wars who shot lightning bolts out from his fingers and yelled “unlimited powah!” while doing so.
See? Quite the spot-on comparison there. Lightning even struck St. Peter’s Basilica not once, but twice, when Benedict announced his resignation in 2012.
Art imitating life. Unlimited powah!
The Two Popes features Anthony Hopkins as Pope Benedict and Johnathan Pryce as Pope Francis and… wow. Do these guys ever bring their A-game into how well-acted and realized these two characters are. Their on-screen chemistry is believable and they disappear into their respective roles like the badass thespians they are.
I mean… You could watch this movie on mute and still be amazed at the quality of the performances. A simple scene where Anthony Hopkins eats a slice of pizza turned into a masterclass in capturing the subtleties and nuances of a human being that has lost touch with the outside world and himself. Little things goes a long ways, and that is what great cinema like this is all about.
The biggest surprise for me was Johnathan Pryce who KILLS it as Pope Francis.
Look at the physical similarities. I can’t think of anyone who would have been a better fit for this role. The makeup team even added liver spots in the right places for both actors. That’s some serious dedication to the craft.
Last week I called Tarantino’s film a masterpiece, but it had an ominous dark vibe throughout and did little to elevate the human spirit. Two Popes is also a masterpiece for opposing reasons. It embraces lightness and raises the spirit.
Much of the film takes place as dialogue between the two men who are each experiencing their own burdens and crises of faith. We come to see the reasons for why Benedict resigned and this helped reform my opinion of who he is as a human being. Although I bet he still shoots lightning from his fingers from some mansion in the Vatican, I can at least accept that his stepping down was a better strategy than I once thought.
Come award time, it’s going to be interesting to see if Hopkins and Pryce receive some sort of dual Oscar for their performances as best actor in a film. I’m not sure how that would work but maybe the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can cut an Oscar statue in half and give them each a piece.
It would be weird to hand out two awards, but both deserve serious accolades for how well they’ve channeled difficult and complex characters. I can’t say one performance was any better than the other but I did like Pryce a bit more because I wasn’t familiar with him as an actor.
I find it rare nowadays to discover a movie that is impeccably constructed with great attention to detail that isn’t focused on making a pile of money at the box office and this is what the Two Popes achieve. The cinematography, lighting, music, acting, script, direction, scenery… all come together to produce a captivating and thought-provoking examination of Christianity and the rituals, politics and persons embedded within it.
Because of this movie, I can now understand why Francis reacted the way he did in this video when a woman yanked at his arm for attention.
That’s authenticity right there. Just because you’re a pope doesn’t mean you need to put up with ignorant and entitled behavior. Had that were Benedict, he would’ve fried her to a crisp.
Now, onto the Pharmacist.
This is a series and not a film, and I only watched one episode so far, but… boy, did it leave an impression on me.
The Pharmacist is the true story about a man who’s son was murdered in a crime-riddled area of New Orleans in the late 1990s. At the time, New Orleans was considered to be the murder-capital of the United States and thus, most of the murders have gone unsolved. The family of the son deals predictably with grief and self-blame but it soon turns into vigilantism once it is made apparent that the New Orleans police department wasn’t taking the case seriously enough to find out who was responsible.
The father, Dan Schneider is a hard-working all-American pharmacist who prizes family above all else. As frustration mounts in wanting to learn who killed his son, Dan embarks on a crusade to discover the answer for himself.
What he finds is shocking and unexpected.
As he processes the revelation and his grief, Dan then notices a high-volume of prescriptions for opioids within his line of work. Because his son was addicted to drugs, he makes it his mission to attack the root of the problem and that is when the show evolves into a story about a man battling against corruption, which includes amoral pharmacists, jaded police detectives, corrupt politicians and the frighteningly deep pockets of big pharma itself.
The Pharmacist is a tale of faith, love, family, justice and activism that prompts the asking of questions such as: How far would you go in seeking justice for the death of a loved one? How would you grieve? What does faith really mean and involve doing? How important is family?
What is most interesting about this limited series (4 episodes) is the message of hope it conveys. Much like the Two Popes, both films had an ideological core that everything else spun around and that core had a lot to do with the importance of standing up for what you believe in. No matter how at odds it may be with the world or what challenges are in the way. Authenticity is depicted as an active rather than passive principle and these two films do an excellent job of exploring the difficulty of expressing these values.
Both films are sobering true tales of human frailty and the beliefs needed to transcend our flawed natures. With the Two Popes, I learned about the importance of having authentic beliefs. With the Pharmacist, I learned about putting those beliefs into action and knowing that such journeys can lead to making a transformative impact on the world around us. Should we truly uphold the beliefs we claim to stand for.
Again, it is rare for Netflix to host such illuminating content among much of what it currently offers. A lot of movies and television shows these days are designed to distract us from a mundane and cynical reality and few products of entertainment leave us feeling inspired or informed about anything that could be applied to ordinary life. The Two Popes and the Pharmacist do an incredible job of uncovering what it means to be a human being and forcing an examination into who we are and what we are willing to die for.
Because if we have nothing to die for we have little reason to live.
Really live.
As I said with Molly’s Game, sometimes the most enthralling stories to tell come from real life.
We need to celebrate and reward content like this because it’s the only way we can hope to see more of it.
Two Popes — 5 out of 5
The Pharmacist — 4.5* out of 5
*first episode only
