We Have a Pope

There's so much rich comic and dramatic potential in Nanni Moretti's new film that it is simply dismaying to see how wide of the mark it consistently lands. A papal election results in the surprise victory of Michel Piccoli's bemused cardinal, who promptly has a breakdown and sends the Vatican into a panic. An atheistic therapist (Moretti) is called in, but then the new Pope goes off on his own voyage of self-discovery outside the Vatican walls, leaving Moretti with little to do but play volleyball with the rest of the cardinals. Quite why these particular storytelling decisions were taken is a mystery, but they leave We Have a Pope feeling fatally unbalanced, with laughs thin on the ground and its satirical jabs timid. Plot strands that appear important are arbitrarily discarded and the film builds to a most perplexing climax. Few pictures this year can possibly be as frustrating. In the hands of a focused satirist with a thorough grasp of his/her ideas, this could have been gold. [Philip Concannon]