Abel Ferrara’s Padre Pio is a fusion of two souls, each as rough-hewn and fragmentary as the other. Set in the immediate aftermath of World War I in the Italian village of San Giovanni Rotondo and filmed on location, it’s partly a biopic about the Catholic saint Pio of Pietrelcina (Shia LaBeouf), for whom every waking moment seems a dark night of the soul. But it’s also a dramatization of the struggle between the landed gentry and the soldiers who return disillusioned from the war, culminating in violence after a stolen election.
Ferrara and co-writer Maurzio Braucci, instead of treating Catholicism and Marxism as antagonistic, find resonance in their iconography, their shared valorization of the downtrodden, and the zeal of their adherents—as well as their crises of faith. It isn’t heresy to say that Padre Pio is a spiritual successor to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew.
Still, anyone looking to Padre Pio for a complex narrative of class struggle in the interwar period is bound to be disappointed. Tension between a young firebrand, Luigi, (Vincenzo Crea), and a patient cadre, Silvestro (Luca Lionello), over the question of reform or revolution goes undeveloped. And Renato (Brando Pacitto), a landowner, and his lackey, Vincenzo (Salvatore Ruocco), are caricatures of the sort depicted by the most vulgar propaganda.
Pio’s characterization is somewhat more nuanced, thanks to voiceover narration and a few hallucinatory sequences in which the friar holds a conversation with the devil, or sees a living, breathing Madonna instead of her statue. Fighting the temptation to suicide, he himself is assailed by doubt as to whether he’s a saint or a fraud, admitting to a fellow friar that “sometimes it feels like the Lord has abandoned me, and I’m essentially talking to myself.”
In a scene of seemingly minor significance, an illiterate peasant (Ignazio Oliva) confesses to Pio that, in the wake of his sons being killed in the war, he can’t comprehend the will of God in keeping him and his wife alive to suffer. In response, Pio tells him a story about how he would watch his mother working at her embroidery when he was a child. Because he was small and seated on a low stool, he’d see her work from underneath, where only the “knots and the confused threads” were visible. He’d ask why it was so ugly. She’d lower the frame to his level “and I would see,” he says, “all the colors were in the right place, and the pattern was beautiful.”
Pio’s parable, besides illustrating the opacity of divine providence, gestures toward a Marxist conception of society, which, to be understood, must be analyzed from a detached, structural, totalizing perspective: a god’s-eye view. The parable may also supply a clue as to what this perplexing film aspires to be. Offering visceral immediacy over meticulous construction, Padre Pio bristles with arresting images. For one, Alessandro Abate’s cinematography makes much of the stark contrast between San Giovanni Rotondo’s white stone walls and the drab clothes of its inhabitants, set off with the odd blood-red flag or handkerchief.
Also of note is a malefic cameo from Asia Argento, ominously credited as “Tall Man,” as well as a scene where Pio inspires a mentally and physically disabled man to take a few steps. Unfortunately, these images often feel disconnected from those around them. Throughout, Ferrara prefers to plunge his audience among the “knots and the confused threads” of his characters’ lives, while holding a grander narrative design—if there is one—at arm’s length.
To this end, Ferrara and Braucci shun the screenwriting dictate that two separate storylines must not only converge but influence one another. When the film’s two threads intersect, they do so only briefly and obliquely—and in no way resolving one another. This puts the onus on the audience to detect their thematic symmetry, as if the filmmakers have dumped two shattered pots out on a table and asked us to do the work of gluing them together into a single pot. Whether this comes off as a refusal to condescend to their audience, or lazy storytelling, will likely depend on the temperament of individual viewers. Deliberate flouting of conventions or a byproduct of a troubled production, either way, it ends up reinforcing Padre Pio’s themes.
By making a film in 2022 that, in its climax, tethers an anti-democratic massacre to Pio’s symbolic martyrdom, and then dedicating it to Ukraine, Ferrara hammers home his theme of authoritarianism versus democracy as a Manichean struggle. If such a good-versus-evil worldview is appropriate to Catholicism, it’s less so to Marxism, which interprets politics as a matter of history and economics, not morality per se. Still, as a sort of Kiplingesque “How the Saint Got His Stigmata” fable, and a visual knuckle sandwich to boot, Padre Pio should not be dismissed as a patchwork that it seems to be at first blush.
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