Released in the UK to coincide with International Women’s Day, this biopic of Italian nun Francesca Saverio Cabrini, also known as Mother Cabrini (1850-1917), is literally a hagiography. Cabrini, played by Cristiana Dell’Anna, was canonised a saint in 1946, making her the first US citizen to be sanctified. But don’t let the religious angle put you off too much. In fact, the film is reasonably critical of certain members of the clergy who stood in the way of Cabrini’s charitable goals, including Pope Leo XIII (Giancarlo Giannini) and the Archbishop of New York, Michael Corrigan (Swiss army knife supporting actor David Morse).
Then again, Cabrini is presented as pretty much wholly (even holy) good, a fierce little creature who would let nothing impede her aim to build orphanages, hospitals and other charitable institutions to help the poor. Surely, given she was a human being, there must have been some dark side? A little too much of the sin of pride, perhaps? A sin of omission or two, maybe, which stopped her from noticing wrongdoing within her institutions? Lord knows there was plenty of that to go round in late 19th- and early 20th-century orphanages and the like. If, however, you can suspend such scepticism, Cabrini’s story is rather absorbing and the film offers a lushly mounted portrait of life in 1880s New York, when immigration was just as much of a contentious issue as it is today.
After a bit of story setup in Italy, explaining how Mother Superior Cabrini wanted to start a mission in China but was persuaded by Pope Leo XIII to go to New York instead, the script gets going when she arrives in Manhattan with small superfluity of nuns, a gaggle of five who barely get a word to say throughout even though they must have been pretty instrumental in Cabrini’s success. After making their way to a notorious slum in the Five Points, a Manhattan neighbourhood that’s now changed beyond all recognition, Cabrini gets to work building an orphanage after much conflict with Archbishop Corrigan over fundraising. Indeed, there’s an interesting emphasis here on the financial side of Cabrini’s business, and although she may have be named the celestial patroness of all emigrants, perhaps her beneficence should be extended to tax accountants as well.
Either way, massive sets enhanced by CGI and period-accurate design get across how grinding the poverty was at the time, while the dialogue illustrates how deep the prejudice was against darker-skinned immigrants from southern Europe. The cinematography by Gorka Gómez Andreu, however, keeps nudging us to think beyond such worldly matters with very on-the-nose beams and shafts of illumination from above, as if God were a klieg light. It’s moments like that which remind you that director Alejandro Monteverde and screenwriter Rod Barr also paired up for Sound of Freedom, the pseudo-factual, QAnon-themed Jim Caviezel-vehicle from last year about a government agent saving children from child traffickers which got lots of flak for its inaccuracies. Cabrini seems less egregiously Maga-friendly on the face it, though others may find hidden messages that diminish its content.
• Cabrini is in UK cinemas on 8 March.
