Cabrini (2024)
Directed by Alejandro Monteverde
Co-written by Monteverde and Rod Barr
This review begins with a long context-setting prologue. Scroll down to a heading that says “Cabrini” if you want to skip to the review itself.
So a few years ago the actor Jim Caviezel— who first became widely known1 as the star of Mel Gibson’s right-wing Roman Catholic horror movie “The Passion of the Christ” —decided to further tarnish his career by starring in a weird little indie film called “The Sound of Freedom.”
I don’t know how what the phrase “the sound of freedom” suggests to you, but this was not a movie about the American civil rights movement or the liberation movement in South Africa or even a niche subject like Jamaica (as we see in the current film about Bob Marley). It was a feature adaptation of the story of a man named Tim Ballard. Stay with me here. Ballard was a former U.S. federal agent of some kind who decided that the route to a conservative political career was to become known as an “anti-trafficking activist.” He created an organization called Operation Underground Railroad2 and recruited people who wanted to work against the evil of child sex trafficking.
But to really get his reputation as a right-wing activist and hero in gear, he went down to Columbia, staged a party and invited local sex workers to recruit children and teenagers to attend. His goal seems to have been to get footage of himself playing the hero somehow, but before he could get to that part of the party, it was busted by the Columbian CTI (the country’s equivalent of the FBI). They arrested some people and somehow Ballard managed to create a stirring tale out of this.
Enter director and screenwriter Alejandro Monteverde, who had already made a 2006 film, “Bella,” about a Mexican couple who consider aborting their first child but decide not to. This was enough to make the film popular with anti-abortion groups and get him audiences with Pope J2P2 and with then-President Bush the lesser. According to an LA Times interview with Monteverde3, he was next writing a movie about a billionaire “who buys children to free them” when he was introduced by “Bella”’s producers to Tim Ballard. Long story short, Monteverde decided to make his anti-trafficking movie about Ballard, and it became a surprise hit — and now I’m finally getting to the point — after it was picked up for distribution by a company called Angel Studios.
Angel Studios — no, I never heard of them until I went to see “Cabrini.” Remember the name.
“Sound of Freedom,” completed in 2012 and then picked up for distribution years later by Angel Studios, was a surprise hit, embraced by conspiracy-minded people who tended towards the Q-Anon end of the spectrum. But in the aftermath several things happened. For one thing, several women employees of Operation Underground Railroad alleged that Ballard made inappropriate advances during “mission trips” abroad, and Ballard quietly left the organization4. There were also allegations that Ballard mislead donors and used donations inappropriately.5 The director, Monteverde, attempted to distance himself from the film, according to his LA Times interview.6 Ballard, Monteverde, Angel Studios and others are now the focus of a lawsuit by one of the women arrested at the Columbian party.7 Real sex-trafficking experts have attacked “Sound of Freedom,” saying it offers a false picture of the reality of sex trafficking.8 And a 51-year-old Missouri man who donated money toward the film’s publicity was arrested on child kidnapping charges,9 though the charges were later dropped.10
Now what the hell does any of this have to do with the movie I saw today and am reviewing here, “Cabrini” — the story of a real-life Italian-American nun who founded a worldwide missionary order and built orphanages and hospitals? Aside from the same director, screenwriter, producers and distributor, that is. Because quite frankly I never would have found out about any of this shit if not for what I experienced before the film began.
Here’s what happens when you see “Cabrini.” Two of the coming attractions before the movie were for do-gooder movies that will be distributed by… Angel Studios, the same distributor. (One is “Sight,” in which Terry Chen11 plays an inventive, tenacious eye doctor of some kind. The other is “Possum Trot,” in which “22 families from a rural black church in the small East Texas town of Possum Trot adopt 77 of the most difficult to place kids in the foster system.”) The message that “these are GOOD movies about GOOD people and isn’t it NICE to be able to watch an OPTIMISTIC movie about something GOOD” was relentless. And Angel Studios’ name was plastered on both of them. They even gave a QR code to let audience members of “Cabrini” — I’ll get to it eventually — buy advance tickets to one of these upcoming movies, suggesting that this advance sale would send some kind of message to Hollywood.
So what IS Angel Studios? It’s a company made up of four Mormon brothers. I’ll let you look them up yourself, but here’s a good piece to start with — a piece which says that the advance-ticketing gimmick I’d witnessed before the showing of “Cabrini” was something Angel pioneered with “Sound of Freedom.” In any case, the pre-”Cabrini” program was so weird, so trying-too-hard, that I just had to look into them to see what the hell was going on. They brought this on themselves, and anyone who goes to see “Cabrini” will see it too.
So, finally, to my take on:
Cabrini
Now if you were a distributor whose surprise hit had become infamous for publicizing the false-but-presented-as-true-and-heroic actions of a man who was subsequently disgraced, and which Hollywood looked upon as little better than Q-Anon propaganda, you might be a little careful. You certainly wouldn’t buy a film by the same team — writer, director, producers — would you? Reader, they did. “Cabrini” is the fruit of the same tree that brought forth “Sound of Freedom.” But maybe Angel Studios figured that a movie about a sainted Catholic nun, in which she is pictured as a proto-feminist who won’t take no for an answer and who out-talks the men who control everything to get her plans fulfilled — a sort of modern-day Joan of Arc, minus the armor — would be safe. Or maybe they just looked at the money that “Sound of Freedom” made and ignored the blowback. In any case, “Cabrini” was created by the same team, and is distributed by the same Mormon company.
This film stars an Italian actress, Cristiana Dell'Anna, as a nun who has founded an order of sisters — the year is 1889 — who run a couple of orphanages in Italy. She wants to extend her order’s work worldwide, starting in China, but the archbishop tells her to stay “where you belong,” namely Italy. She travels to the Vatican, backs the Pope into a corner, and he approves her idea, except that she has to start not in China but in the worst corner of New York City, Five Points. She takes 6 nuns with her to New York, where she runs up against not just the pitiful poverty of the district to which she’s been sent, but florid anti-Italian prejudice.
The rest of the movie shows Mother Cabrini struggling to establish, then expand, the reach of her work, always fighting against sexism on one hand and anti-immigrant sentiment on the other. As far as it goes, the film is a faithful hagiography of the woman who became the first American to be named a saint. Though the script gives her little range, Dell’Anna does her best to portray Cabrini’s courage, moxie, and dedication. John Lithgow, as the New York mayor who opposes her until he is, like the pope, backed into a corner, leads a dutiful cast of supporting players.
As with any haigiography, the script offers none of the woman’s inner life. And its two hour and twenty minute runtime does not have room for explaining how and why she became a nun and got so dedicated and so confident in her mission. She has a line early in the film where she says “The world is too small for what I intend to do,” and though we admire the sentiment, we don’t know who she is aside from her dedication.
A quip from the Pope (played by that old Italian romantic star of the 70s, Giancarlo Giannini) brings the film into focus: “I can't tell where your faith ends and your ambition begins,” he says, defeated by Cabrini’s insistence. But as a viewer, I couldn’t tell where her faith begins. For a woman who founded an order of nuns, and who is never seen outside her religious persona, aside from a quick pre-meal grace she is never shown to pray. And the classical singer whose voice fills the movie’s soundtrack sings without words, so there’s no religious content there. In fact, there is almost no mention of God in the movie at all. In a movie about nuns and their work, isn’t that strange?
I thought that Angel Studios might have something to do with that. Judging by the movies they advertised before the show, and given their Mormon character, they might have preferred a movie about a do-gooder who doesn’t even mention God, the better to market the film to a large audience. (You can be sure that Mormon filmgoers are well aware of the affiliation of the company’s founders.) One of the producers says that he wants audiences to see “Cabrini” as more than just a religious movie12 — yet it’s hardly that. Producer Jonathan Sanger:
It was very important to me that the emphasis of the story wasn't intended to be a religious, faith-based kind of story about the value of prayer - not that that isn't valuable. But that wasn't really what the movie was about. The movie was about what you can do yourself, without relying on supernatural forces, just what you can do in the world to make it a better place.
Emphasis mine. And there’s nothing wrong about a person whose strength and clarity of vision allows them to do extraordinary things. It’s just that without a religious motivation, we can’t understand the character.
One final thing, and this is something that put me off. While every movie for 125 years has used technical savvy and tricks to present on screen things that would have been too difficult or expensive to film, this film’s special effects are intrusive and obvious. Every image is painted with a sepia tinge to sentimentalize it, whether it’s an image of the Atlantic ocean, a sewer where people are living, or the office of the mayor. Every room seems to be filled with smoke or dust diffusing the light. It’s a mise-en-scene as painted by a mediocre artist at a company that makes calendars for Christian homemakers.
It’s probably too soon for artificial intelligence to have made a difference in how a film looks — at least an indie film like this one (though frankly I’m not sure what the line is between special effects and what AI will do in films we see next year and from then on) — the wide shots of shocking poverty (or, for that matter, just tracking shots of a more normal 1890 New York street) shimmer just too much. Just as the character of Mother Cabrini seems to have no room for doubt or flagging tenacity, the vistas in the film are just too perfect. They’re like a poverty scene that you’d conjure using AI, with romantic lighting throughout. Far from helping me enter into a scene, these perfect images created an uncanny valley. Desperate poverty never looked so good.
I was going to say “widely known, for better or worse,” but I think everyone agrees it was clearly for worse.
The intention to mislead people by coopting the name “underground railroad” and attaching to a dubious movement that has nothing to do with the phrase’s 19th century origins is obvious.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2023-08-14/sound-of-freedom-movie-director-alejandro-monteverde-box-office-controversy
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/sound-of-freedom-our-tim-ballard-sexual-misconduct-claim-1234827374/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5y8pm/operation-underground-railroad-investigation-misled-donors-lied
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2023-08-14/sound-of-freedom-movie-director-alejandro-monteverde-box-office-controversy
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/sound-of-freedom-tim-ballard-angel-studios-lawsuit-1234974841/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/sound-of-freedom-child-trafficking-experts-1234786352/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/sound-of-freedom-movie-donor-kidnapping-1234801061/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2023/10/04/sound-of-freedom-kidnapping-accessory-charges-dropped/71043905007/
Fans of “The Expanse”will recognize Chen from his standout role in Season 3 of the series.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/cabrini-producer-jonathan-sanger-says-the-film-is-more-than-a-religious-story/ar-BB1jIEqV