The Crime of Padre Amaro

Monday, December 17, 2007

Have you seen this Gael Garcia Bernal fellow yet? I've heard him described somewhere as the Mexican Johnny Depp, and that's not a bad comparison. He's an impressively versatile young actor who is practically hot enough to be a model. I am starting to become a fan of his, so that's why I checked out The Crime of Padre Amaro.

This is the story of a young priest who has an affair with a... parishoner? Deciple? Church Goer? Attendee? Whatever Catholics call people at church.

Anyway, he nails this broad and falls in love with her, but he tries to keep it under wraps because he is trying to work his way up God's corporate ladder.

This is great fodder for an introspective character study, or even some good old fashioned melodrama. You have an opportunity to explore the contradicitons within this character... how he justifies or rationalizes his actions versus his beliefs, etc.

Only the movie is not really that. It keeps trying to frame Padre Amaro's transgressions and corruptions in terms of the larger transgressions and corruptions within the Catholic church. The movie always wants to pull back to the bigger story of how the church deals with scandal, and some of the politics involved. Early on we see them silence an unfavorable news story with questionable methods, and we see Amaro as very willing to play his part in it. He is meant to be seen as one flawed cog in a bigger, more flawed machine.

Well, I'll be honest, as someone who is not at all religious, this stuff wasn't very compelling to me. The central idea, on a human level, is interesting, but all the church-y politics left me uninterested. Maybe if it had been a more multi-faceted, thorough examination of the institution, like The Wire, that could have been up my alley. But it seemed like more of a vague and unfocused attempt to show how the church is wrong about some things.

Then, not only is the human drama downplayed a little, but then they don't really make us empathize with the characters much either. As I mentioned above, I think Garcia Bernal may just very well be a great actor, but he does not have much of a character here. I got that he was an ambitious but flawed priest, willing to manipulate to save his ass, but I never understood what was going on internally with him. Did he feel any guilt over his actions? Was there any crisis of faith? How serious is his faith? And so on. These are all important questions, and I don't think they were clearly answered.

It doesn't help that he's the main character, but we never feel any sypathy for him. He's kind of the bad guy of the story, or certainly not a good guy, and without any access to his inner-self, the movie is a bit of a hollow experience. Most of the other characters are equally bad or ambiguous. There is no real entry-point for our emotions.

The bottom line is, the movie falls flat dramatically, despite the inherent melodrama of the plot. It's hard to care about a bunch of bad things happening to a character you not only don't like, but don't really understand anything about under the surface.