Things are not helped by the fact that, in terms of physique and kinesiology, Hopkins is utterly unsuited to playing Benedict. He depicts a bullish, lumbering man, puffed about the face, eyes like those of a dipso with a bad hangover. Everything is wrong; every graceful quality of Joseph Ratzinger is absent: the bearing, the diffidence, the passion for ideas. Neither the shyness nor quiet dignity is there.
Hopkins is also dissatisfying in that he portrays this man—one of the most brilliant Europeans of the past half-century—as a dogged doctrinalist obsessed with homosexuality and clerical celibacy. It feels like he has not, in preparing for this part, picked up even one of Ratzinger’s sixty-odd books or glanced at one of his encyclicals. Anyone who had done so would have been unable to avoid knowing that the great themes of Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy were love, charity, truth, hope, faith, reason, silence, and beauty. Hopkins is an actor of extraordinary genius, who normally approaches his parts with the deepest attention and care. Here, he has chosen to inhabit a caricature designed by others for reasons of myopia, malevolence, or both. …
The film was preceded by a book, The Pope: Francis, Benedict, and the Decision That Shook the World, also written by McCarten. His description there of Pope Francis is a mixture of the clichéd and the cockeyed: “A breath of fresh air, with a rock star’s charisma, there was a touch of John Lennon about him (both men had been on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine) with a propensity for jaw-dropping statements to make even his most ardent fans gasp.” Bergoglio is a “charismatic, fun-living Argentinian, on the surface a humble man, an extrovert, a simple dresser (he wore the same pair of black shoes for twenty years). . . . He’s a man with the common touch. A man of the people. Once even had a girlfriend.”
