“THERE BE DRAGONS”
Not star rated | Drama
PG-13. 1 hour 59 minutes. At area theaters.
Roland Joffe, the director of “The Mission” and “The Killing Fields,” is back in theaters and back in the world of period pieces with “There Be Dragons,” a Spanish Civil War tale that tells the story of the controversial founder of the Catholic Opus Dei organization.
It’s an odd but ambitious choice, and a muddled and unsatisfying film.
In the early 1980s, Spanish journalist Robert (Dougray Scott) is doing a story on Josemaria Escriva, who founded Opus Dei in 1928, just before the Spanish Civil War. The journalist’s estranged father, Manolo (played by Wes Bentley of “American Beauty,” in old-age makeup in many scenes), knew Escriva in childhood and during the war.
The embittered old man wants to know, “Why would you write a book about him?” This was before Escriva was hastily made a saint under Pope John Paul II.
But Robert is determined, so his father sends his boxes of documents and makes him an audiotape. We follow the two characters through a rich man/newly poor man childhood on up to the events leading into the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.
When the politically polarized country splits, Manolo joins the republicans and spies on them for the fascists — the army and its German advisers. Josemaria continues his priestly duties, keeping his communal lay group Opus Dei intact, dodging communist death squads.
But Joffe, who wrote the film, seems uncertain of how much whitewash to apply to this story before we start laughing at him. (Opus Dei members produced the film.) So he lets himself get distracted by a love triangle involving Manolo and a Hungarian leftist fighter (Bond girl Olga Kurylenko).
Joffe seems way off his game here, as if forced to contort his script, filling it with blind spots, to tell a saintly story of a saint many don’t believe all that saintly.
