El Crimen del Padre Amaro Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)November 25th, 2002
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
EL CRIMEN DEL PADRE AMARO (THE CRIME OF FATHER AMARO)
Directed by Carlos Carrera
R, 120 minutes
With the help of that incomparable publicity machine, a condemnation by the Catholic Church (and a threat of excommunication to its stars), "El Crimen del Padre Amaro" has blown away box office records to become the biggest indigenous blockbuster in Mexican movie history. Santa Fe audiences will remember a similar hit-making apparatus at work in the transformation of a forgettable photo collage into last year's local tempest in a teapot.
Director Carlos Carrera and screenwriter Vicente Leñero have taken a 19th century Portuguese novel and updated it to a turgid contemporary Mexican melodrama that tells a story of idealism, temptation, and corruption in the Church - or, as the movie's poster has it, "Love... Lust...Sin." It's an irresistible trifecta, made more potent by the casting of Gael Garcia Bernal, the heartthrob from "Amores Perros" and "Y Tu Mama Tambien" in the title role of Father Amaro, the dewy-eyed young priest being groomed for stardom.
Amaro arrives in the little town of Los Reyes to apprentice with the local priest, the aging Father Benito (Sancho Gracia). Before long, he begins to learn a few disturbing facts about his mentor. Benito's steady bedmate is Sanjuanera (Angelica Aragon), the proprietress of the local eatery. And Benito is also in bed with the region's drug lords, who buy his influence with God with huge sums of money that they funnel for laundry purposes through the Church. The cocaine harvest is financing a new church hospital. "We are taking bad money and making it good," the worldly priest explains.
Sanjuanera has a 16-year-old daughter Amelia (Ana Claudia Talancon), and a more winsome lass does not tread the streets of Los Reyes. Amelia is in love with Ruben (Andres Montiel), a young journalist, but when she discovers he's something of an agnostic she drops him like a hot tamale and starts making inappropriate eyes at the new priest. And when she comes to the confessional and starts confessing to touching herself erotically in the shower, it's more provocation than a poor boy fresh from the seminary can be expected to resist.
Before long, Amaro and Amelia are continuing the tradition of their elders. He even wraps her in a blue robe and tells her she's more beautiful than the Blessed Virgin. But the net Carrera throws is aimed at more than just the carnal enthusiasms of a devout young couple. His larger target is the incompatibility of the spiritual and the political in the Church. The Bishop, a porcine sophisticate, runs the district like a Mafia don. He's aware of the cozy relationship between the Church and the drug lords, a marriage of the divine and the dirty which he fosters with the equanimity of an Oliver North setting up the corrupt bargains of Iran-Contra. (My wife suggests another neat simile: ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theater.) When a newspaper editor assigns Ruben to write an exposé of the Church's seamy financial arrangements with the crooks, the bishop uses his power to force a retraction and get Ruben fired. And he assigns Amaro to carry that water, a job to which the young priest takes with disturbing conviction. The clouds of idealism which he arrived trailing are visibly beginning to disperse.
Bernal is a fine actor, and he manages to barely suggest a gathering stain of coarseness as the story progresses. He is still young and innocent-looking, still beautiful, but you can begin to visualize the bishop he will one day become. And Talancon also projects an innocence, informed by a certain manipulative sensuality, and a willingness to cheat the Church when it suits her urges, and to cheat the truth in the name of the Church when it suits her agenda. There is precious little true innocence to be found in this landscape, if by innocence we mean purity of soul. Its main representative is Father Natalio (Damian Alcazar), an ecclesiastical rebel who lives and works among the peasants in the mountains and treads a slippery path toward excommunication.
Father Amaro's story is a pilgrim's progress gone wrong. The singular form in movie's title seems at first to be a misnomer. By the time he's through (or rather by the time the movie ends, for Amaro himself is far from through), he has amassed enough crimes of commission and omission to start his own Purgatory. But perhaps there is one overriding umbrella crime under which the others shelter, and that is the crime of worldly ambition. The Church on which Carrera turns his camera is a place of good people and bad, politicians, idealists, power brokers, the misguided, the well-meaning, the crazy, and the corrupt - in short, a microcosm of society, a human institution, no worse and no better than the rest.
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