Movie Review: 'Padre Pio'

Padre Pio (2023)

Directed by Abel Ferrara

Written by Abel Ferrara

Starring Shia LeBeouf

Release Date June 2nd, 2023

Published June 1st, 2023

Padre Pio is a bizarre movie. Ostensibly, the film stars Shia LeBeouf as a troubled Priest who many claim as a Saint who suffered the stigmata, the wounds of Christ appearing on the hands and feet. He was claimed as a Prophet by some and a madman by others. Mostly, the man who came to be known as Padre Pio is known for becoming the biggest champion of confession. He had many passionate tenets to his preaching but Pio was quite adamant about the importance of confession and that appears to be the legacy that the Catholic Church celebrates, far more than his stigmata claim.

So, why is a movie about this man so strange? Well, it's directed by Abel Ferrara for one. The odd and controversial director has taken his legacy in an weird and sad direction late in his career. Having always leaned heavily into Catholic imagery and themes, he's been working in Italy the last few years and on incredibly low budgets. Budgets are so low that his last film, Zeroes and Ones, starring Ethan Hawke, is nearly unwatchable. That film looks as if it had been filmed on a cellphone someone was carrying inside of a green plastic bag. Zeroes and Ones is legitimately among the worst movies ever directed by a director of Ferrara's reputation.

Padre Pio is slightly better looking than Zeroes and Ones but the low budget is still very much Omni-present. The opening scene has an almost embarrassing level of amateur cinematography as Shia LeBeouf's Padre Pio arrives at an Italian Abbey riding a donkey. You can sense right away that this will be one of those performances by LeBeouf, intense to the point of parody. The passion that LeBeouf brings to his craft is admirable but, in the wrong movie, it can be embarrassingly, uncomfortably, and unnecessarily intense.

And then LeBeouf just sort of fades into the background for a while. The film is set in the immediate aftermath of World War 1. Italians are returning home and are aching for change to a society where the rich dominate and the poor are impoverished to a ludicrous degree. It's a moment ripe for a socialist revolution and that's what begins to happen in this small town. Agitators begin holding public meetings calling for improved working conditions and the rich employ thugs to hold on to their tenuous political power.

Helping the elite of the city is the church. We see Priests praying over the weapons of the thuggish authorities of the town and holding hushed meetings with the rich elites. This would appear to place someone like Padre Pio in opposition to his own church, a genuine conflict. But no, this never comes into play with Padre Pio's storyline in any way. This is the set up for a scene in which a group of socialists are gunned down while attempting to vote in their local election. This plot never intersects with Padre Pio.

If I were to theorize, I would have to assume that Abel Ferrara wanted to make a movie about fascists and socialists in Italy post World War 1 and no one would give him money for that movie. But, when he found a Hollywood star, even one who isn't exactly a box office draw, it was enough to get the movie off the ground financially. Then Ferrara proceeded to make both the movie he wanted to make and a movie that stars Shia LeBeouf. He made the films simultaneously and then combined them to satisfy whatever contractual obligation he had to a distributor, studio or his star.

That certainly tracks with the movie I watched, two completely disconnected narratives that share a time and place but little else. The stories seem to be happening in the same place, at the same time, but I could be wrong. Nothing in the Padre Pio side of the movie named for him, places him in a time or context relevant to the story of violent conflicts between socialists and fascists in post-world war Italy. Padre Pio never, NEVER, interacts with anyone in the fascist-socialist storyline.

It's utterly bizarre and it makes for an incomprehensible mess of a movie. On one hand, we have a straightforward narrative of about underdogs fighting a fascist upper class and in the other, Shia LeBeouf is wearing religious garb, holding communion, and hallucinating naked women into existence. Then he wakes up with stigmata and the movie ends. Sorry, 'Spoiler Alert.' As if I could spoil a movie this bizarrely convoluted. Padre Pio is a truly bizarre trainwreck of a movie, a wreck in which a pair of movies crashed into one another and wound up sewn together into an ungainly whole.

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