Reception
The Day wrote that in their considering the difficulties in offering a project about an incumbent Pope, the filmmakers treated the subject "with verve - and honesty". In not being a true documentary film, the depiction of the life of Karol Wojtyła was not "tied to exact factual details", and included the addition "theatrical flourishes and appropriate emotional atmosphere", but still remained "a sound and vivid dramatization" reflecting the biographical record of a man whose "background had plenty of high drama in it without making it up". The did note that "some of the transitions were a bit ragged, and some of the ecclesiastical artifically stiff," but that "generally, the story has authenticity".
The Courier in noting that lead Albert Finney was Protestant, both director Herbert Wise and writer Christopher Knopf were Jewish, and cinematographer Tony Imi was Roman Catholic, wrote that the film was successful as "a compelling story about a man, rather that a religious tract about a pontiff." Producer Alvin Cooperman spoke toward the difficulties extant in writing about a living exalted person, and how he worked to dispel preconceptions that he was offering either a documentary or a "hallowed portrait" of (then-incumbent) John Paul II.
The New York Times made note of difficulties inherent in creating a film about a historical person while the person is living. The offered that while a person might be mythicized after their death, and might even be so when living, it is when they are living when they are living that a production company has boundaries, as "current images, common knowledge, popular consensus shape them." They wrote that this project was "at once enhanced and hindered by this." They granted that while Pope John Paul II's life story is "is sure-fire for a biography", and viewers would likely have their own views and impressions of him, but that with his being a living subject, when it comes to historical accuracy, "A filmmaker can tamper with this only lightly, not only because heavy tampering would be distasteful, even irreverent, but because it would be jarring, an assault on our sensibilities." In the production company respecting this, the film becomes "almost a series of anecdotes."
Boston Globe made note that director Herbert Wise's choice of flashback to tell the story made the timeline easy to follow and allowed him to "introduce scenes from Wojtyła's early life in black and white." They applauded makeup artists for their making actor Albert Finney look "eerily like the Pope", and the actor himself for mastering "the Pope's stoop and his hand gestures". They found that in the director portraying "Wojtyła as a man without a flaw", the story itself was "without a moral dilemma and, therefore, without dramatic edge".
Read more about this topic: Pope John Paul II: The Movie
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)