At the opening of
The Two Popes, things are going badly for Cardinal Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce), so it comes as something of a surprise when Pope Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins) summons him to Rome. They are opposites, Bergoglio a reformer, Benedict a conservative, but what unites them is something we discover over the course of the first half of the movie: both wish to resign their posts, but only one can. Benedict, we learn, has run out of options, no longer able to hear God, and so he has invited his harshest critic to take over the Holy See from him. Bergoglio won't have it at first, and so much of the balance of the movie is about Benedict convincing the future Pope Francis to step in.
Another large part of it is finding Bergoglio's catastrophic failure to protect his priests in the aftermath of a 1976 military
junta in Argentina. The euphemistically named
"National Reorganization Process" murdered and tortured tens of thousands, rounding up anyone who might have even been near a Peronist or uttered a socialist thought.
Joe Morgenstern's review in the Wall Street Journal notices that virtually all of the film (or its most important parts, anyway) are "mostly the luscious fruit of [screenwriter Anthony McCarten's] imagination", so it's not to be taken
too literally. But it's a visual feast, and a fantastic character study by two actors at the top of their craft.
