Romero
Written by John Sacret Young
Directed by John Duigan
A Paulist Picture
Should any American movie-maker be trusted with any story which features peasants, particularly Hispanic peasants, listening humbly and gratefully to idealistic priests? Considering what Hollywood artisans have made of idealistic priests (Miracle of the Bells, The Cardinal) and noble peasants (Juarez, Viva Zapata) separately, the combination of the two ingredients should fill any reasonably sensitive moviegoer with foreboding. Such fears are justified by the opening moments of Romero, the Paulist-produced film account of the last years of the courageous Salvadoran archbishop, from the time of his appointment to his martyrdom. Yes, one more American director, John Duigan, has hired that same homogenized but immortal pack of campesinos, and there they go again, nodding their grateful agreement as worker-priest Father Grande (Richard Jordan) lectures them about their God-given rights to land and ballots. Yes, they’re nodding, they’re staring at him with hope shining forth from their eyes, they’re holding immaculate straw hats in hands free of callouses, their lips are moving prayerfully, and . . . yes, you’ve guessed it already. They’re getting ready, once again, these patient celluloid peasants, to be mowed down by right-wing bullets.
The villains arrive promptly. As farmers and priests board the bus that will take them to town to vote (while the not-yet-Archbishop Romero sits in a nearby car), the Salvadoran troops, commanded by oily-haired, sneering Commandante Ricardo, motor into view with rifles blazing. Bullets shatter the windshield directly in front of the bus driver. Caramba! Has the poor man been killed or merely blinded? We can’t see the bloody result at first because the next camera set-up has moved us forward into the bus. Screaming peasants are on the floor, the priests are offering their bodies as shields. Terror! Pandemonium!
As the camera cuts back to the front of the bus, we notice that there is no longer any bus driver. He couldn’t have escaped because the vehicle doors are still closed. Yet he is nowhere in view. In the hail of bullets, he has simply evaporated.
Thus, we are alerted by the first few minutes of Romero to two facts. First, the filmmakers are manipulators. Goodness is going to be represented by all those wistful peasant faces, not one of which looks as if it had endured more than two hours’ exposure to the sun in an entire lifetime. (And if I learn tomorrow that these peasants were played by real farmers, it will only show that the magic lenses of slick movie-makers can iron out wrinkles, creases, and life itself from the most careworn visage.) Evil will be represented by sneering Latino military types with slicked-down, shiny, black hair and twisted mouths. Second, we are going to be manipulated incompetently by a director who not only doesn’t know how to stage action but can’t even make a logical transition from one shot to the next.
A complex, literate script might (barely) survive bad staging. No such relief is forthcoming from writer John Sacret Young. Along with the heavy-handed embodiments of good and evil, we get flat-footed, ironic foreshadowing. Father Grande and some other liberation theology types are soon speculating as to who will replace the recently deceased archbishop of El Salvador. Father Grande himself? one of the priests wonders. Father Grande just chuckles self-deprecatingly. As played by Richard Jordan, he’s that kind of guy. Some arch-conservative is then named, and groans are barely suppressed. Rome wouldn’t be that crazy! Hey, wait a minute … How about . . . Romero? Romero?! You have got to be joking! The worst would be Romero! Why, the man is a … a … a bookworm! An uncommitted dreamer!
Well, one scene later, Romero (Raul Julia) wearily trudges back from the polls. (The evil Ricardo was content with stopping the bus and ordering everyone off. Foiled by Father Grande, who decided that everyone would walk to the election booths instead of riding, the commandante had to let off steam by shooting the church bus again. Fascists, like communists, are hell on corporation property.)
Romero goes to his room in the rectory and fills a basin with water. He removes his bookworm’s glasses and rubs his uncommitted eyes. Dreamily, he responds to a knock on the door. In a non-committed tone of voice, he tells his secretary, who’s entered, to take a seat at a table stacked with a dreamer’s books. “No, Father, it’s you who had better be seated. I’ve got some tremendous news to tell you…. ”
And so there we have the set-up: virtuous peasants on one side, the vicious military on the other, and, between them, Romero, who must inevitably move from his middle-of-the-road position to alignment with the people. Excuse me, I mean The People. The only question is, What atrocities, what outrages will be selected by scriptwriter and director to drive the protagonist to commitment?
In his review in the Washington Post (more respectful than mine but quite acute about the movie’s flaws), Hal Hinson sums up neatly the course of events that convert the movie Romero:
The film takes us on a grim guided tour. It shows us scenes in which the militia opens fire on the crowds of peasants who have gathered to take communion; the torture and killing of his fellow priests and friends; and the occupation of a church by soldiers who hold the sacrament in contempt.
Add to this the manhandling of Romero when he attempts to rescue the sacrament from the occupied church (the soldiers blow the tabernacle and its contents to smithereens with their bullets), the brutal stripping of Romero of his vestments as he visits a harassed village, and, of course, the assassination which closes the film.
And add to these enormities the fact that whenever priests are persecuted, they seem to be engaged in totally apolitical actions (apart from that trip to the polls). When the militia opens fire upon the people in the square, they are doing nothing but hearing Mass; no other purpose is announced, whereas in real life the gathering, strictly nonviolent to be sure, was meant to protest the recent, rigged election. When Father Grande is killed, he is simply taking children to school (following a scene in which his so-called “radical activity” was shown to be nothing more than mass baptism).
Whenever the archbishop is abused, it is because he is trying to protect church property or ritual or personnel. When Romero visits a torture victim, it is a priest who is the victim. Even when a lay person is executed, it is a girl whom we have always seen in the company of priests.
Add all these dramatic choices up, and you can see for yourself what is wrong with the film. It’s not that it misrepresents the bursts of anti-clericalism that have indeed come from the ranks of the right-wing military in El Salvador. (The slogan, “Be a patriot: Kill a priest” was a byword among certain soldiers for awhile.) But, since all clerics shot or tortured are shown performing strictly orthodox, apolitical tasks, the cumulative impression Romero gives is that simply to be a priest is to risk government reprisal at any time. From this, you would have to conclude that the main platform of the ruling party was anti-clericalism, not anti-communism.
Of course, such a premise makes nonsense both of history and of the movie itself. I’m willing to believe almost any ill report of the egregious d’-Aubuisson and his brutal followers, but if his platform were strictly one of anti-clericalism, most of the middle class as well as the peasant population, would be up in arms against him, and the pope would have threatened excommunication a long time ago. And why would the initially moderate Romero have been applauded by the military leaders (as we see in the film) as a “stabilizing” influence who would lead the clergy away from direct political action, if these very military leaders were at the same time allowing (encouraging?) their soldiers to kill every harmless priest in sight?
Bear in mind that we are shown the archbishop taking a more radical line in his sermons and politics only after he sees his priests persecuted, not before. Were the fascistic elements in the government not interested in placating Romero and, through him, the Church? If not, why not? These questions are raised in my mind by the filmmakers’ blank indifference to them. Or was Hal Hinson correct in suggesting that the filmmakers’ approach was adopted “to present Romero not as a Marxist or even a Marxist sympathizer, but as a good shepherd, motivated in his actions against the government by his allegiance to the Church and to the great masses of disadvantaged poor who make up his flock. By taking this approach, they hope to demonstrate that his choices were moral and not political, and therefore above reproach and exempt from debate.”
I feel that Young and Duigan are being disingenuous by not showing more clearly the political content of those worker-priests who, at first, despised Romero as a probable do-nothing, but whose deaths (especially that of his friend, Rutilio Grande) may very well have radicalized, or at least activated the archbishop. What were the filmmakers afraid of”? If some of the priests were sympathetic to socialism or even communism operating under the rubric of “liberation theology,” why not show this? Even the most conservative of intelligent filmgoers can feel sympathy for the courage and basic humanitarianism of those clerics who tried to take up the cause of the downtrodden even when that courage and compassion led them into ideological folly. In showing all martyred priests in the movie as politically innocuous, Romero‘s makers underestimate their audience.
Furthermore, to maintain the simple-minded opposition of military gangsters versus apolitical holy men, Young and Duigan have falsified the course of Salvadoran politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. According to what is on screen, the military-backed regime is both evil and stable, confidently performing horrors against mournful, impotent crowds led by gentle, unintellectual priests who only want to say an outdoor Mass now and then. After the election which opens the movie and the specific results of which we never see, there is never any mention of what is going on within the government. If it should be argued that the movie is dealing with Romero and not the government, then it must be pointed out that the archbishop was watching attentively the various political struggles, and that many of his pulpit pronouncements (almost none of which we are allowed to hear) were predicated on what was going on in the centers of power.
In fact, Salvadoran politics of the last two decades, though repeatedly and gruesomely interrupted by hit squads like ORDEN, have been dynamic, not static, and constantly edging towards democracy and land reform, not more oligarchy and feudalism. The government of Carlos Romero (no relation to the archbishop), seen as gloating and unshakable in the movie, was actually toppled by a coup d’etat and was succeeded in turn by two juntas, both composed of a combination of liberals and conservatives, including some very democratic-minded young army officers. Archbishop Romero, both in Church sermons and in speeches made on the Church’s radio station, asked the people to give the juntas a chance. He did this because both juntas promised land reform, the cessation of tortures and random killing, and the restoration of illegally held prisoners to family and friends.
When both juntas failed (Romero withdrawing his support from the second one just before his death), it was through inability to control the death squads and thereby keep the confidence both of Salvadoran citizens and the Carter government. A third junta, headed by that heroic and tragic man, Jose Duarte, took charge and soon instituted the land reform that the previous juntas had failed to execute.
But in the movie the right-wing politicians are smilingly secure while the only (marginally) effective opposition to them are left-wing terrorists who occasionally pick off a hapless government bureaucrat or two. There is no mention of the Christian Democratic Party (Duarte’s party, operating since 1960, squelched in 1972, revived before the archbishop’s death). No mention of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (a non-military political union of several parties that opposed the government).
Do the filmmakers want Americans to think that between the guerrillas and the military there was absolutely no third way, and that the USA was directly funding military thugs and not putting pressure on all the successive leaders to move towards democracy? And do they want American moviegoers to think that Romero was denouncing the military-backed regime without seeing the possibility of one of the democratic parties assuming power? Are we to think that the archbishop was despairingly leaving to his flock the sole alternative of communist rule by the FMLN? Perhaps this impression is conveyed through the incompetence of the filmmakers, but if it was intentional, then this reviewer can only cry shame.
There is only one moment of real complexity in this entire movie. Just before a squad of soldiers opens fire on the crowd of campesinos in the public square, a young soldier levels his rifle, takes aim, and then closes his eyes. He is obeying orders but cannot stand to see the results. This one brief shot ignites the imagination. Quite possibly, this soldier is a former campesino himself or the child of farmers. Perhaps he has become a soldier so as to earn money to feed his parents? And perhaps his parents or some other relatives are somewhere in the public square about to be fired on? Only with this heart-stopping glimpse does Romero suggest the bad jokes that history plays upon those multitudes of people who can take so little part in shaping history.
Yet in its closing half-hour, Romero, without becoming more cinematically dexterous or politically complex, does become somewhat moving. Why is this so? For two reasons.
First, the very absence of political complexity in the movie forces us to accept Romero as a sort of schematic passion play with Raul Julia playing not a particular man in a particular place called El Salvador, but rather as a monumental figure of Christ-like compassion and endurance. Scenes like the one of Romero being stripped of his vestments by soldiers encourage the resemblance to the Saviour because they remind us of a station of the cross. This, too, may be manipulation, but who can fail to be moved when we see a dignified man accepting and transcending one indignity after another? In this sense, Romero works, albeit at a low level, as a sort of cinematic hagiography.
Second, and more importantly, Raul Julia, within the severe limits of Young’s writing, gives a superb performance. Working with a script that gives us nothing of the archbishop’s background, Julia tries to convey, with gesture and vocal inflection, a distillation of Romero’s character: the habits, quirks and tendencies that motivated his decisions and determined his future. He gives us a slow-moving, lumbering man whose feelings of compassion and outrage begin somewhere deep within him and rise to the surface with glacial slowness and irrevocability. This is the least impulsive hero imaginable. He makes Paul Scofield’s Thomas More look like Bertie Wooster.
When told of his appointment, Romero, stooped over a bowl of water with which he has just washed his face, freezes in the act of reaching for a towel. The way Julia holds his hand out, water streaming from his fingers, conveys the feeling that Romero has just encountered an invisible wall. When the archbishop is locked in jail overnight and hears a prisoner in a nearby cell shrieking under torture, we first see a sense of outrage slowly transform Romero’s face. Then, when he shouts at the unseen torturer to stop, we can see that he is forcing himself both to comprehend and to amplify the righteous anger that is so strange an emotion to this reticent priest.
This man is trying to cope with a horror for which nothing in his background has prepared him. Julia’s Romero is a man who never knew he would matter so much to the world and who never guessed that so much of the world’s pain would seek him out.
But while Raul Julia leaves us with an after-image of heroic fortitude, the film’s script has deprived Romero of his very specific political hopes, his power to move many with forceful language, and his unegotistical consciousness of his own importance as the man most trusted, with good reason, by the majority of his countrymen. In fact, the movie has made Romero seem passive, a mere sufferer, a hero for masochists.
Is this really a tribute? Or has Romero been martyred again?