Padre Pio Whitewashes The Man

Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016), depending on what day of the week you ask, might have this critic’s vote as the greatest movie of the 21st century so far. Scorsese’s reverence for the convictions of those Portuguese Jesuit missionaries effuses a difficult story that is more Gospel than hagiographical (though the characters are fictional), climaxing with the main priest recanting his Christianity through an act of faith. The paradox of the Christian faith has never been depicted with such beauty before.

There was reason to hope Padre Pio could have been Abel Ferrara’s Silence, albeit a sliver more fucked up: a drama about sincere religious people, taken seriously, by one of our more interesting active auteurs. Apparently, Scorsese used up all of that artistic formula. Ferrara’s newest film, the drama Padre Pio, disgracefully shrivels in the presence of Silence.

The film’s eponymous saint, Pio of Pietrelcina, was an enigmatic and controversial Italian Franciscan born four years after Benito Mussolini. Much like Scorsese’s upcoming film about Jesus, a biopic on Pio from the likewise controversial Ferrara, on paper, is a match divined by God’s self. Pio is most known for being the most famous public figure to have (claimed) to receive the stigmata—the wounds of Christ’s passion. He also, according to his followers, often performed miracles (only one of which is shown here) and was apparently blessed with the gift of bilocation? For a saint, he also had more than his share of crassness and bluntness.

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