'The Two Popes,' which I watched this past Sunday with a group of friends, is a very enjoyable movie. It's also not without a hefty dose of gravitas. I'd like to comment on that and leave to the side for the moment the interesting issue of where fact ends and fiction begins in the film.

To start off, the movie is beautiful. It's great to look at, it's genuinely funny, and its climax provides a satisfying emotional resolution. I'd definitely watch it again; in fact, I'm planning to. I had a great time seeing the numerous shots of Buenos Aires and hearing Spanish spoken as it's spoken there. (Having spent a semester in Buenos Aires, the city has a special place in my heart.) While you watch a movie, you in a certain sense enter into another world, and 'The Two Popes' is a cinematic experience that rewards the audience for doing so.

As for the seriousness in the movie: generally-speaking, the movie is a bit of a throwback to the general mood back in 2013 when Pope Francis was elected, at least as I remember it. In 'The Two Popes,' Benedict doesn't exactly come across as a bad guy, but he does come across as ultimately ineffective, as a living anachronism. He turns over the papacy to Francis because he sees in him an embodiment of the new life the Church needs to survive. The two are bosom buddies by the end, and there is hope for the Church.

The general attitude here strikes me as very beautiful and very moving, and it is, of course, a bit idealized. I did get the sense in 2013 that Francis was making being Catholic fun and exciting; I get the sense in 2020 that, however exciting Francis's papacy is, it has not erased serious divisions in the Church, the kind that, in my experience, manifest themselves most seriously in fundamentalist attitudes and fanaticism cloaked as sanctity. The movie doesn't entirely pretend like Francis flips a switch and everything is alright in the Church; as he himself says towards the beginning of the film, sin is a wound, and it doesn't disappear when the stain is removed by confession. The movie itself makes emphasizes Francis's sense of having been complicit in the 1976-1983 Argentine military dictatorship. Argentina, as I see it, still has not experienced closure regarding that trauma; the country is as divided as ever, and that division is made even more painful in light of the realization that it was a crisis over division that made the dictatorship possible in the first place. Francis, as I discovered during my semester there, is actually something of a symbol of division in Argentina rather than an antidote to it. 'The Two Popes' is beautiful in that it recaptures the excitement of the initial honeymoon phase of the Francis papacy; it's complicated in that it gestures towards but does not entirely resolve the traumas (from sex abuse to dictatorship) that it references.

The phenomenon of Pope Francis carries a lot of significant weight for me; as a young Catholic student at "the Jesuit university of New York," I even sang in the choir of the cathedral (pictured above) where Pope Francis was archbishop of Buenos Aires. It is my hope that, almost 7 years into Francis's papacy, we might recover the sense of hopeful excitement that heralded his election and, in that excitement, we might have none of the naivete that supposes there to be easy solutions to the serious divisions that persist.