Of course, it sounds glib and perhaps insensitive to say that pedophile priests are yesterday's scandal, and that the world has moved on to others of arguably greater import, but then only the most naive could imagine that the problem no longer exists. Still, a big gray cloud of "why now?" hangs heavily over "Our Fathers," the Showtime movie about the tragic crisis and its sobering ramifications.
In addition, the film, premiering at 8 tonight on the pay-cable channel, is no prize package. It's flabby with unnecessary details, some of them arbitrary as well as irrelevant. It lacks the kind of cohesive punch delivered by, to name one prominent example, "Indictment: The McMartin Trial," which aired on Showtime's rival HBO back in 1995.
"Indictment" dealt with a vast national scare about alleged child molestation in nursery schools and the ensuing hysteria, but it concentrated artfully on one specific case that symbolized and epitomized the madness.
"Our Fathers" is, by contrast, all over the place, cramming portraits of too many individual victims onto the canvas. The film opens with the case of Angelo DeFranco (a fat Daniel Baldwin), who suffered sexual abuse from a priest in the '60s and was still having nightmares about it as an adult in 2000. "I must be assured that he's not around," DeFranco says of his abuser. "He must never serve as a priest again."
DeFranco rants and weeps for the first 10 minutes of the movie but then almost vanishes from it, or at least fades into the background, popping up for a few lines of poorly muttered dialogue every now and then. Our attention is diverted to Ted Danson as Mitchell Garabedian, the lawyer who dared to sue the Catholic Church on behalf of dozens of victims of pedophile priests, but he's not the dominant character in the movie either.
Christopher Plummer's performance as Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston certainly looms largest of any in the film, and Plummer more than anyone else looks his part. Writer Thomas Michael Donnelly (adapting the book by David France) may have thought he was portraying Law as complex, but instead the character comes off as merely inconsistent and unpredictable. At times, the cardinal seems deeply saddened at the suffering of the victims, but then he'll suddenly turn into a cunning and ruthless politician, a coverup artist who's compared by at least one character to Richard Nixon.
Brian Dennehy makes a strong impression, as he virtually always does, in the role of the Rev. Dominic Spagnolia, a priest who dares to attack the cardinal -- from the pulpit -- and becomes a populist hero to the growing numbers of victims who step forward. But his story takes the film off on another tangent of dubious urgency. Meanwhile, there's no attempt to help us understand the pathology of the pedophile, or why the illness, if that's what it is, appears to have been so common in the priesthood for so long.
One of the executive producers and the director of the film is good old Dan "The Winds of War" Curtis himself, but seasoned veteran though he is, he fails to give the movie the sharpness and impact it should have had. His insistence on labeling many scenes with time and place captions becomes ludicrous when he cuts to the unmistakable sight of a certain unmistakable landmark and a caption appears reading, "The Vatican. Rome." Oh, so that's the Vatican, eh? Always wondered what it looked like. And it's in Rome, huh?
Do tell.
The scene set there, a meeting between the very distressed Law and Pope John Paul II, has to be pure conjecture on the filmmakers' part as it was held in private in the pope's chambers. Any docudrama has to rely on a certain amount of fabrication, but the meeting is written in a way that sounds considerably less than authentic.
In a nonce we're back in Boston and being made aware of lawyer Garabedian's personal financial problems. This has arguable relevance in that one minute Garabedian is in it for the money and the next he's crusading on behalf of principle and decency. Any way you slice it or dice it, however, there can be no earthly reason for a scene in which Garabedian's car is towed away because he has an excess of parking tickets.
Ellen Burstyn has one scene as an agonized mother and makes the most of it, but most of the rest of the huge cast consists of some of Canada's least riveting actors (the film, like so many others these days, was shot in Toronto). Much of the "drama" takes place in telephone calls and conferences, which are hard to enliven.
It would be unacceptable, of course, to depict in any detail one or more of the crimes being committed. There are flashback scenes in which priests touch boys on the shoulder or knee and tears immediately begin to pour from the frightened lads' eyes, and another scene in which a priest calls a boy into a room and says, "Okay, Tom, show me."
Later, however, in what seems a questionable decision on the part of the filmmakers, an adult victim describes an act of abuse in hideous detail. No one is going to mistake "Our Fathers" for the feel-good movie of the year.
Indeed, whatever the film's virtues and occasionally powerful scenes, it's hard to imagine anyone sitting down to watch it with anything but reluctance. If Showtime had a masterpiece on its hands, viewers could be urged to endure the sordid details -- but, all too obviously, it doesn't.
Our Fathers (2 hours 10 minutes) airs tonight at 8 on Showtime.
