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Faith comes knocking on atheist's door
Carrie Rickey
Philadelphia Inquirer
Published: Friday, May 20, 2005
Though Marco Bellocchio's My Mother's Smile announces itself as critical of the pieties of the Vatican and motherhood, it is a riveting, rich portrait of an atheist who thinks he's resistant to faith but may be in the throes of a feverish conversion.
The movie centers on Ernesto (the marvelous Sergio Castellitto, an actor with the face of John Turturro and the force of Al Pacino). Ernesto is a celebrated Roman artist estranged from his wife and from his family of origin.
It might be said that God reconnects Ernesto with his son and his siblings. But not in the ways you might guess. In this film, deemed blasphemous by the Roman Catholic Church, Ernesto is Doubting Thomas as reimagined by Kafka.
On the same day that Ernesto learns that his 10-year-old son has been talking to God, the painter also receives news that his mother is a candidate for canonization. Clearly, someone is trying to tell him something.
Employing light and shadow in old-masterly arrangements, Bellocchio frames Ernesto in vaulted interiors, like the Virgin Mary in an Annunciation. The film's painterly light and sacred music are weapons in a holy war for Ernesto's hardened heart.
His wry smile and skeptical eyes don't completely armor Ernesto from his son's comely religion instructor and a Vatican emissary.
Castellitto, writer-director of the recent film Don't Move, is an actor of enormous resources. He proceeds through the film in a state of slack-jawed incredulity that makes his Ernesto equally comic and dramatic.
When he hears his wife suggest that it might be useful for their son to have a saint for a grandmother, it confirms Ernesto's religious cynicism. But when he encounters the man who claims that his mother miraculously healed him, who is Ernesto to say it isn't so? Still, thinks the son who didn't much like the mother whose smirk he has inherited, how could a dumb cow of a creature manifest miraculous powers?
Throughout the film, Bellocchio maintains a quizzical tone. It is possible to see Ernesto as a petulant man in denial, a nonbeliever with good reason, and a postulant about to affirm belief.
In the end, Bellocchio suggests in this spiritual thriller that perhaps faith is the dream from which we do not awaken.
