Different ways to tell the same story

By Robert Lloyd

Dec. 1, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

IT is no miracle that two TV movies about the late Pope John Paul II -- and not even the first, Hallmark Channel having imported an Italian-Polish co-production called “A Man Who Became Pope” in August -- will appear in the next four days. It is merely a sign of the obviousness of television programming.

ABC bats tonight, with “Have No Fear: The Life of Pope John Paul II”; on Sunday, CBS unveils “Pope John Paul II,” a two-part “mini-series event” that concludes Wednesday. Neither film works particularly well as history or drama; neither is terribly thought-provoking, which would be a welcome quality in a movie about a religious figure, though each has passing moments that suggest something of the man’s originality and effect on his friends, followers and foes. John Paul II buffs might want to check in for purely devotional purposes -- though ABC’s version is less of a hagiography than CBS’, neither should offend believers -- but for the ordinary, curious viewer not familiar with the mechanics of popehood and the whys and wherefores of Karol Wojtyla’s ascension to it, more questions are raised than are answered.

Though the two films inevitably overlap, even to the point of dialogue, they take largely different approaches and, indeed, produce surprisingly different popes. The CBS film, which has the benefit of length and Vatican cooperation -- it premiered there, in fact, before an audience including Pope Benedict XVI -- is the more extravagant and, one might say, exterior: It puts its energies into re-creating Great Moments and especially into the pontiff’s battles with Poland’s teeth-gnashing Soviet overlords. (They fear his “uncommon skills of charm and a complex sense of humor, which make him dangerous.”) It’s admiring of its subject, sometimes to a fault. He’s a saint, in the secular sense: flawlessly good and giving, with nary an outburst of temper.

It’s also the more conventionally dramatic film, with extended relationships between its characters underlying the march of history.

There is James Cromwell as his early mentor Cardinal Adam Sapieha; Ben Gazzara, startlingly frail, as Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Agostino Casaroli; and, as Polish Primate Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, Christopher Lee, looking like -- and it’s not his fault, really, it’s just the weight of the culture -- Count Dracula or Count Dooku, or both, depending on which culture is weighing on you.

Cary Elwes, who plays Wojtyla up to the moment he becomes John Paul -- at which instant he magically becomes Jon Voight -- makes the young priest a relentlessly humble and Happy Wanderer, leading his cadre of beautiful young people on idyllic country outings where they talk about sex, in a Catholic context. (Women regard him admiringly, even longingly, but his business is elsewhere.) Voight picks up some of these traits -- John Paul was the joking pope, the skiing pope, the peripatetic pope, the baby-kissing, sombrero-wearing pope -- and deepens them.

Voight is good at embodying power, and he catches the stages of John Paul’s physical diminishment, from injury and from Parkinson’s disease, with astonishing exactitude: He doesn’t appear to be acting. It’s an impressive performance that does not keep the film he’s in from becoming tedious. (It is corny and predictable even before he arrives.)

THE ABC film -- which also airs in Spanish, via SAP -- attempts, by contrast, to catch the inner man.

It starts strong, spending enough time with the child who will be pope to give a sense of the small person inside the later, large one, and the early losses (mother, brother, father) that helped form his ideas about productive suffering; it also acknowledges the ongoing tension of the intellectual and the mystical whose resolution Wojtyla made his life’s work and allows him a few flaws and the admitted sin of pride. (“I have made mistakes,” he tells God.)

Thomas Kretschmann (“The Pianist”), a little long and lean for the role, plays the pope as a dynamic, deep thinker, but the accelerating pace of the movie runs roughshod over the drama, the movie becomes a series of unsatisfying tableaux vivants hurtling him quickly toward heaven.

‘Have No Fear:

The Life of Pope

John Paul II’

Where: ABC

When: 8 to 10 tonight

Ratings: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

Thomas Kretschmann...Pope John Paul II

Bruno Ganz...Cardinal Wyszynski

Joaquim de Almeida...Archbishop Oscar Romero

Jasper Harris...Karol Wojtyla (boy)

Ignas Survila...Karol Wojtyla (teenager)

John Albasiny...Father Dziwisz