Padre Pio - A great performance by Shia Labeouf

One never expects a biopic from authors like Abel Ferrara, even when the title of the film leaves no room for misunderstanding.

In fact, Padre Pio is not a film about the internationally renowned saint and to be honest, it is not even one film, but two.

Two traces, two stories that intersect in a single person: a man first and foremost.

One is the story, in the gap between the two great wars, of a land of poverty and troubles, the other is the personal story of a young friar who doubts everything, especially his faith. To keep them together suffering in all its forms, from that of the body to that of the soul. Suffering is one and it is the same to which that friar will try to bring relief both with words and with deeds.

The battle with evil is more than a personal struggle for the Pious 'man'. Evil lurks everywhere in every form, from political clashes to conflicts of the soul, everything translates into a single trail of blood which is a heavy burden on the shoulders of a man who would like to carry it on himself, alone, to lighten others and shorten the distances between him and God. Because to read God's embroideries you need to elevate your spirit and look at them from the right side, the straight one and not from below and from the reverse where it's all knots, confused entanglements and chaos.

Padre Pio of Ferrara is a man of flesh and blood, he is a man who questions everything, he is a man who suffers and fights for himself and for others and does it silently. He is not the media Saint, elderly, with the reputation of the curmudgeon. He is a young man with the yearning, the will and the real strength to be able to change the world, even if only that of his small community of San Giovanni Rotondo, but to do so in the image of God. Padre Pio is a medium, a driving force, a bridge spanning two wars, two eras, two dimensions, material and spiritual. His suffering is a necessary crossing to bring himself closer to God and therefore God to men. His miracles are not inexplicable mysteries but possible, real, concrete changes. Of a man for other men.
Abel Ferrara tells a story on two tracks but with a single destination: a man, Padre Pio.

The narrow shots, the unstable shots of the hand-held camera, the loss of fire restore the torments of so many poor Christs, bringing the viewer into a cinematographic fiction that becomes truth and into a past time that becomes present.

The men, the faces, the methods change but the diatribes, the motives, the conflicts, the dynamics are the same today as they were then. The Saint is not the man who firmly believes but the one who continually seeks faith in doubt, relief in suffering, change in crisis, salvation in damnation.

Padre Pio is an emotionally very powerful film thanks to the crazy acting work of Shia Lebeouf and the direction of Ferrara capable of channeling, through the cinematic language, his own personal motivations that lie behind the desire to tell this story in this way and that transcend the images and facts, thus extending them to a wider and more universal sensational (literally linked to feeling, to the senses) and emotional sharing.