The Two Popes stars Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce — that’s two reasons to buy a ticket, right there — as Pope Benedict XVI and his successor Pope Francis I, and it is wildly entertaining, so now you have a third reason too. True, it does, as others have noted, shy away from directly tackling the most difficult questions currently facing the church. But is that really the film you want to see? Rather than this affectionate and literate bromance that does, in fact, nudge us towards the bigger picture, but slyly? Also, it is brilliantly comic. Pope Benedict, for instance, doesn’t get jokes but does try to tell one, which no one else gets. ‘It’s a German joke, so it doesn’t have to be funny,’ he then explains. I laughed my head off. Unquestionably, it is the most papal fun I’ve had in years.
The Two Popes is directed by Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener, City of God) and written by Anthony McCarten (Darkest Hour, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Theory of Everything), based on his own stage play of 2017. It is ‘inspired by true events’ and explores the resignation of Pope Benedict, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and his replacement by Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, the current Pope Francis. My word, that sounds dreary, but I promise you it isn’t.
The conceit, which may or may not be preposterous, imagines meetings between the two when Bergoglio has arrived at the Pope’s summer palace with, in fact, no thought of being elevated to the papacy as he wishes to resign.
Benedict is fiercely conservative and does not hold with moving with the times. ‘Marry the spirit of the age and you become a widow in the next,’ he says. Bergoglio is much more progressive and is unhappy with the way the church has dealt with the child abuse scandals.

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