Some people will like There Be Dragons by Roland Joffe
(The Killing Fields, The Mission) because it is
something of a throwback to the Hollywood epics of old in which a
(usually) tragic romance is set against the background of real
world-historical events like wars and revolutions. The individuals’
experience of these events, as in Gone With the Wind or
David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago, is supposed to cast
dry historical narrative in a new and more thrillingly human light.
As an example of this kind of movie, however, I think Mr. Joffe’s
film is less than completely successful. What I liked about it was
that it was a different kind of throwback: to a time when
Hollywood, if only out of its own self-interest in trying to
attract an audience largely made up of Christian believers, had to
be at least respectful to religion and sometimes produced movies
that were themselves quasi-iconic aids to Christian devotion.
Xavier Beauvois’s
Of Gods and Men is
that kind of movie, but it owes little or nothing to Hollywood. Mr.
Joffe’s picture, by contrast, is Hollywood through and through, and
that’s its weakness. Half of it is about St. Josemaría Escrivá
(Charlie Cox), the founder of Opus Dei, but his story, set against
the background of the Spanish Civil War, has to compete with that
of a fictional rivalry with his childhood friend, Manolo (Wes
Bentley). We learn of Manolo’s joining the Republican side as an
agent of the fascists, of his unrequited passion for a Beautiful
Hungarian Communist (Olga Kurylenko), of the BHC’s spurning him for
love of the Communist leader, Oriol (Rodrigo Santoro), of Manolo’s
crises of conscience with regard to (a) the BHC and his rival and
(b) his ex-friend, the priest — and, as if all this weren’t
enough, of the dying Manolo’s complicated relationship nearly 50
years later with his son, Robert (Dougray Scott), who happens to be
writing a biography of Josemaría Escrivá and is only now
discovering his father’s relationship with his subject.
This, the chronologically latest part of the story, is set
in 1982 and serves as a framing device for the rest of the picture,
as old Manolo’s memories of his early life and the Civil War, put
on tape for his son the biographer, are the ostensible occasion of
their realization on the screen. But of course the son also has to
learn the hitherto unknown and shocking details of his own history
and come to some kind of terms with his father before the latter
dies — and that in such a way as to affirm the message and meaning
of Father Escrivá’s ministry. It should be readily apparent that
Mr. Joffe is unwilling to allow what he regards as the
less-interesting saint’s life to assume the center stage but must
constantly be distracting us with either the romance or the family
drama in such a way as to defeat his own purpose in trying to put
the two stories together.
The movie’s tag line, taken from Oscar Wilde — “Every
saint has a past, and every sinner has a future” — really has
nothing to do with the stories it has to tell but, like the romance
stuff, is there to make the viewers think they’re getting something
more steamy than they really are. All that having been said,
however, the movie does have some of the visual splendor of the old
time epic and rather more of the saintliness of Father Escrivá than
we could reasonably have expected. It does a good job of evoking
the time and place of its setting and, almost as remarkable as its
sympathy for the saint’s Christian piety, it avoids any
glamorization of the Republicans — or, for that matter, of the
Fascists. The murderous hatred towards the clergy of these storied
and often-glamorized “anti-fascists,” both the communists and the
anarchists, is well-documented but a story seldom if ever told in
the movies before.
Indeed, I’d have thought there would be quite enough
real-life excitement in an account of Father Escrivá’s
hair’s-breadth escapes from the killer-commies and therefore no
necessity to weigh it down with the rather clunky fictional
romance, but here, too, Mr. Joffe must have felt the danger of
being seen inadvertently to glamorize the fascists if he had too
freely portrayed the republicans as the bad guys that they so often
were. The best parts of the film are those in which the priest is
called upon to put his priestly duty to others ahead of his own
safety, but it doesn’t do, I guess, to show too many of these.
Likewise, his idea for Opus Dei — “Everyone and everything for
your glory” — together with the Catholic establishment’s view that
“It all sounds rather Protestant: that God is to be found in the
vanities of daily life” — could have done with a lot more
explication but was presumably thought too boring. Or else too
politically risky. Still, what there is of a recognizable portrait
of piety and holiness makes this a movie worth seeing.
