Imagine this on a movie poster: "'Two thumbs up! — Pope Leo."
The pope meets movie stars and directors at the Vatican today, including Cate Blanchett, Chris Pine, Spike Lee, Viggo Mortensen, and Monica Bellucci, to "deepen dialogue with the World of Cinema," says the Vatican. Pope Leo also revealed his four favorite movies.
One is 1965's The Sound of Music with Julie Andrews. Great songs, great curtains, "wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings …" And nuns who sneak under the hood of the Gestapo's cars to remove critical parts, so the Trapp family can flee Nazi rule in Austria, climbing every mountain as they go.
Another is Frank Capra's 1946 film, It's A Wonderful Life. George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, questions the worth of his life while standing on a snowy bridge. But Clarence, an angel, shows him how so many lives would be poorer without him. "Strange, isn't it?" asks Clarence. "Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around, he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?"
The pope also lists 1980's Ordinary People, directed by Robert Redford, about the struggles of a family in which one son has died in an accident, and the surviving son has tried to end his life. A psychiatrist, played by Judd Hirsch, tells him, "Feelings are scary. And sometimes they're painful. And if you can't feel pain, then you're not going to feel anything else either."
And finally, Pope Leo cites the 1997 film, Life is Beautiful. Roberto Benigni plays Guido, a Jewish Italian bookshop owner, sent to a concentration camp with his son. Guido dances and mugs to try to convince the little boy it's all a game, hoping to protect him from knowing the savagery that surrounds them. The film was honored and popular, but also criticized for trying to strike laughs from a concentration camp. Benigni, who's father had been in a Nazi labor camp, told The Guardian, "To laugh and to cry comes from the same point of the soul, no?"
The pope's favorite flick list offers nothing avant-garde, for critics. But the movies he loves are also not all "raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens." They're popular films that show glimpses of darkness, depression, and grave historical events. But as great art can, they still let in slivers of inspiration and light.
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