It’ll Take More Than Confession To Save Padre Pio

In the second season of Deadwood, sniveling hotel proprietor E.B. Farnum makes the mistake of scamming Francis Wolcott, agent of the ruthless mining magnate George Hearst. “Some ancient Italian maxim fits our situation, whose particulars escape me,” Farnum tells Wolcott, backpedaling his way out of certain death. “Is the gist that I’m shit out of luck?” Wolcott asks. “Did they speak that way then?” replies Farnum in turn.
Audiences watching Abel Ferrara’s new film Padre Pio may raise the same question. A biopic about the Italian Franciscan friar-cum-alleged-miracle worker in the abstract, and a disjointed, badly structured Shia LaBeouf vehicle in practice, Padre Pio’s dialogue is spoken entirely in English, save for prayers made in church, and the dialogue is peppered with contemporary cussin’ for the possible goal of supplying shock value that period-appropriate swears might not. In Deadwood, the anachronistic language has intent: Series creator David Milch wrote the exchange between Farnum and Wolcott as a response to comments about the first season’s cavalcade of four-letter words. In Padre Pio, LaBeouf tells one parishioner seeking absolution to “shut the fuck up,” then commands them to “say Christ is lord.”
The interaction recalls LaBeouf’s post-2016 election performance art, particularly his face-off with one neo-Nazi twerp screaming “praise Kek” while LaBeouf, with infinitely greater ferocity, howled “he will not divide us” in return. Ferrara has not merely “cast” LaBeouf as Pio as much as he has made the conscious decision to harness LaBeouf’s known volatile energy in conjunction with his well-documented sins as a man; after feigning a version of on-screen repentance in 2019 with Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy and Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz’s The Peanut Butter Falcon, a pair of films primed to reckon with LaBeouf’s past of public disorderly conduct and alcoholism, LaBeouf was subsequently accused of domestic abuse by his ex-girlfriend, musician FKA Twigs.
Ferrara doesn’t care about how he looks directing LaBeouf in Padre Pio’s lead role; if anyone could care less whether or not commentators, critics and viewers think badly of him for working with people on culture’s “canceled” list, it’s him. Like Mel Gibson’s casting in S. Craig Zahler’s Dragged Across Concrete, LaBeouf’s casting in Padre Pio is almost certainly meant as confrontational. The expectation is that we marry the art with the artist, that we watch the film with LaBeouf’s history and present in mind, because the latter informs the former in at least the scenes where the actor takes up the entire stage. Padre Pio takes place in the aftermath of World War I, in San Giovanni Rotondo, the village where Pio lived out his days; its focus is split between his crises of faith and performance of his clerical duties, and the clash between the local socialist and fascist parties, culminating in the 1920 massacre of the former by the latter – a real-world event that taints San Giovanni Rotondo’s history even now.