Cabrini, director Alejandro Gómez Monteverde’s hagiographic faux-epic about the titular Italian American saint, is the type of movie shown at religious summer camps when the counselors need a break from watching the kids. It’s long and sleep-inducing, but also so artless and inoffensive you could bring it up without worry to a kid’s parents who have EWTN on all day at home. If that situation doesn’t apply to you, do yourself a favor and avoid Cabrini and its absurdly unwarranted 142-minute runtime.
The film follows the journey of Mother Cabrini (played by a wooden Cristiana Dell’Anna), a religious sister and friend of the downtrodden, as she travels with a blessing from the Pope (Giancarlo Giannini) from Italy to America to set up orphanages and help poor Italian immigrants. The America Cabrini first comes to, the Five Points section of Manhattan, is grody and overcrowded, and could use a future saint’s touch. Unfortunately, this well-known setting — essentially turn of the century Lower Manhattan — has been depicted in countless movies before (see: Godfather II, Gangs of New York, Once Upon a Time in America, etc.). Cabrini’s photography and set choices add nothing novel to this canon — the film looks like it was shot on a high school theater set and is tinted with a dim golden glint that makes it feel computerized.
The film may not be eye candy, but it’s certainly not ear candy either. Cabrini’s lines are so clunky and unsubtle they come off more like sloganeering than dialogue, reducing the plot to a mere collection of interactions rather than a coherent arc. From the minute Mother Cabrini sets foot in America, others speak to her in almost nothing but slurs and pithy aphorisms. Even in Five Points where “rats have it better than the children,” in America, “nobody stays for free” but “one small gesture of hope can change everything” (actual lines). Almost every interaction she has with non-Italian-Americans is so cartoonishly bigoted or sexist it felt like it was written by the same high school students who must’ve designed the set. None of Cabrini’s dialogue aids in creating texture or adds unique details, it simply pushes the story along and reinforces the film’s central theme: that Mother Cabrini beat the odds to achieve greatness for herself and her community. It’s a virtuous theme, but it’s presented so crudely that it’s bound to make your eyes roll.
During the film’s postscript, a narrator describes Mother Cabrini as “one of the great entrepreneurs of her time” before any mention of her as a religious figure. This choice of words serves as an interesting — if not wholly unintentional — reveal into the logic of Cabrini. Throughout the film, Mother Cabrini’s work assisting the poor is downplayed as acts of religious liberation. Instead, it is often painted in more secular and patriotic terms, whereby she is both attempting to fight the poverty around her and fight patriarchal and anti-Italian discrimination against her. In its efforts to write a secularized hagiography, Cabrini ends up being a confused attempt to modernize the first American saint.
Photo courtesy of Angel Studios
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