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.
Padre Pio’s two halves stubbornly, constantly butt heads with each other, stories in catastrophic disharmony. There are dueling movies here, one significantly worse than the other; the first depicts the efforts of the socialists to win a free and fair election against the gun-toting fascists who rig the whole affair, accuse the other side of attempting to rig the whole affair, then gun down demonstrators because that’s what fascists do. (Look out, everybody: Topical political commentary, comin’ in hot!) The other movie is about its namesake figure, wrestling with his demons, some of which he even imagines occupying the same spaces as him, which sounds much more intriguing than it actually is.
Ferrara’s examination of what happened in post-war Italy writ large and in San Giovanni Rotondo is so lazy, so surface-level, that it reads as willfully insulting instead of an honest try at saying literally anything about America and Italy’s present circumstances. There is no subtext to Padre Pio’s statements about how fascists take power. There is only text, and the text is written with an astounding lack of grace; characters simply say all the quiet parts out loud, whether the socialists or the fascists, and because the film leaps back and forth from the socialists’ journey toward their inevitable murders to Padre Pio’s meanderings about town, we never develop a relationship with characters in either political camp. They’re outlines. Ferrara never bothers to treat them like actual people, but as half-sketched representations of the human beings either guilty of slaying their neighbors or the slain.
This, frankly, is more shocking than LaBeouf’s presence here, because LaBeouf is at least trying something – even if the “something” is, in a way, performative redemption. He’s a great presentational actor, but his constant bids for redemption, as filtered through his screen performances, are increasingly undercut by his guilt; he’s done heinous things, and while it’s psychologically healthy for artists to use their art to explore and apologize for their misdeeds, this practice has severe diminishing returns. Pio was accused, among other things, of faking stigmata, lying about possessing mystical powers, and sexual misconduct against women; it’s the semi-exploitive contrast of their reputations, and LaBeouf’s commitment to Ferrara’s aesthetic, that gives Padre Pio a faint glimmer of watchability.
But this isn’t the same thing as being actually watchable, and so much of the film is precisely the opposite: Ugly to the point of offending the eyes, from relentlessly dreary backdrops to a recurring use of step printing that offsets genuinely beautiful imagery of candlelit characters and church interiors. The uncomfortable pleasures found in the grotesque interplay of LaBeouf’s notoriety and LaBeouf’s performance aren’t enough to save Padre Pio from itself.
Director: Abel Ferrara
Writer: Abel Ferrara, Maurizio Braucci
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Asia Argento, Marco Leonardi, Luca Lionello
Release Date: June 2, 2023
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can follow him on Twitter and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.