VENICE 79 REVIEW: "Padre Pio" by Abel Ferrara

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What are we to make of the mess that is Abel Ferrara’s Padre Pio? Linking those two names is already bizarre, and yet Ferrara appears to truly have found religion in the guise of Italy’s most popular and
questionable 20th century saint, a man many members of the Church hierarchy of his day, including Pope John XXIII, knew was not what he claimed. This isn’t a biopic though – in fact, it’s not clear what Ferrara means for it to be since he’s attempted to graft Padre Pio’s early wrestling with his faith onto a 1920 massacre in his southern Italian hometown. Somewhere there’s supposed to be a connection between Padre Pio’s “man of the people” image and the fight between evil landowners and rabble-rousing Socialists, but the links are, to be generous, purely spiritual. Shia LaBeouf’s equally unlikely casting as the future saint will generate a certain buzz though very few sales.

Padre Pio may not be a household name outside Italy, but on the peninsula his image is inescapable:
behind café cash registers, in taxis and trucks, on countless tombstones where his face replaces that of

PADRE PIO VERDICT: Abel Ferrara’s total misfire aims to merge the story of a 1920 class-related massacre
with the contemporaneous crisis of faith of Italy’s most popular 20th century saint, but the poor script,
bad acting and overall lack of cohesion make this just a time-waster.

Like Ché Guevara it’s almost always the same picture, grizzled and stern in his Capuchin
robes, his hands swaddled in bloody bandages as a sign that he received Jesus’ wounds.