OVP: The Crimes of Padre Amaro (2002)

Film: The Crimes of Padre Amaro (2002)

Stars: Gael Garcia Bernal, Ana Claudia Talancon, Sanco Gracia, Luisa Huertas

Director: Carlos Carrera

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Mexico)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Unless a movie is Blade Runner or the original Star Wars trilogy, it is a finite thing.  It doesn't get to shift with the winds, or be updated with new technology & ideas.  This is a good thing.  It means that films are going to be a representation of their own era, something we can look back upon as an historical artistic artifact & understand what was important to the artists who made it.  It also means that their politics do not shift as public attitudes do.  This was the case with The Crimes of Padre Amaro, a 2002 Foreign Language film nominee starring a young Gael Garcia Bernal.  The movie in 2002 was controversial, but not necessarily for the reasons you'd think (as you'll see below), and some aspects of it, which are played as romantic (in a Thorn Birds kind of way) in 2002 read much differently in the light of recent revelations about the Catholic Church.  But I'm getting ahead of myself-first, let's discuss the plot of the picture.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Father Amaro (Garcia Bernal), a young & handsome priest who is moved to a small town on his first church assignment.  This is seen as a stepping stone spot for the young man, whom many assume has a bright future in the church.  There he encounters Father Benito (Gracia), who is having an affair with a local restaurant owner (violating his vow of chastity) and creating a hospital using funding from a local drug cartel to cover expenses.  We also meet Amelia (Talancon), a sixteen-year-old who is devoted to Jesus & sexually attracted to the idea of him (she admits that she masturbates thinking about him), and after dumping her boyfriend for not being as devoted to God, she starts an affair with Father Amaro.  When she gets pregnant, she has a back alley abortion largely at Amaro's insistence, and it goes wrong, killing her.  Amaro doesn't see punishment, though, as the church uses their connections to blame Amelia's death on her ex-boyfriend, who has been writing articles in the local newspaper critical of the church, and thus he is punished for Amaro's sins, which he must carry with him as he moves on to more success within the church.

The movie's politics, as I mentioned above, are challenging, as you can see from the plot.  While Garcia Bernal & Talancon are less than two years apart in age in real life (and when this film was made, were both in their early twenties), the idea that this adult male priest is romancing a 16-year-old girl is shocking, particularly when seen in the light of the molestation charges against the Catholic church.  At the time, this film caused an uproar, with the Catholic Church trying to ban a story about a priest who seduces a woman & then pressures her to get an abortion (which she dies from & he never faces justice), which makes sense because it was scandalous and invited conversation about the celibacy of priests (as well as abortion).  Of course, as the next decade would attest, it was the teenage aspect of the story that would become the true source of horror for the Catholic Church, as that was clearly what was being covered up more than the abortion or celibacy angles of the priesthood.

The movie, though, is not good.  Garcia Bernal is one of the screen's most beautiful figures, a man so pretty you actually gasp in some scenes it's so shocking to see him onscreen, but while he is a fine actor (he'd turn in a mesmerizing piece-of-work two years later in Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education), here his Padre Amaro is listless, only coming to the surface briefly.  I think the way Garcia Bernal wants to play him is more a man who wants to have his cake and eat it too, being both devout and kind of a hypocrite, but the script doesn't give him that kind of character arc until the very end, and at that point the movie has bored you enough that it feels like an unearned turn more than a twist.  With nothing else in the film living up to the hype, Garcia Bernal's interpretations are too late to save the picture.