CABRINI is a handsome throwback to the hagiographies done so well by Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. Replete with luxurious cinematography worthy of anything to be found in a fine arts museum, it is fueled by a passionate, coolly confidant performance by Cristiana Dell’Anna as Mother Cabrini, America’s first saint. Amid the expected, and perhaps necessary tropes, typical of biopics of this type, she and her co-stars imbue reverence without stodginess to the remarkable story of a woman set up to fail, and who then proceeded to prove the world wrong about her.
She does so, overcoming clerics, governments, and prejudice by the force of her personality. Part of that drive is her lack of time. She is a woman with a death sentence hanging over her head due to lungs compromised in a near-drowning as a girl. Refusing to accept the doctor’s prediction that she would be bed-ridden, the continues refusing to accept what others consider to be her place as a woman in the late 19th century. She dreams of leading a mission to China and giving a home to its orphans the way she has sheltered orphans in her native Lombardy, and from there to found similar institutions around the world. As she puts it to the Pope (Giancarlo Giannini) when she finally gets an audience with him, the world is too small for what she intends to do. She gets her way, sort of. His Holiness sends her to New York to minister to the Italian immigrants who are dying in the streets.
The film charts how she becomes the first woman to lead a mission overseas, and show how she succeeds with only the five nuns who accompany her to New York City, and her own refusal to be deterred, even by the splendor of the local archbishop (David Morse) or the violence of the pimp she crosses in the savage Five Points neighborhood where she will start her first orphanage. The tropes are predictable, but are executed with a real sense of the physical dangers involved, and the overt, demeaning prejudice faced by Italian immigrants and unquestioned by everyone else at that time. From the opening shot of a child (Federico Ielapi) pushing his dying mother through the streets in a wheelbarrow as he howls for help in Italian as passersby, and the hospital lobby he invades, turn away in disgust, to the machinations of New York’s mayor (John Lithgow oozing the stink of Tammany Hall) sending police to break up an Italian Heritage celebration, and all the colloquial slurs delivered with vulgar outrage, the plight of the immigrant, poor, illiterate, and unable to speak the local language, is set forth with stinging clarity.
Swathed in black dress festooned with cross and rosary, prim oversized bow keeping her bonnet in place, Dell’Anna can be an imposing figure, but she still finds the joy in Mother Cabrini, and her tenderness, as well as her drive, and makes it all of a piece. It helps us over the rough spots, when she is called upon to deliver some lines that are unnecessarily melodramatic. Fortunately, they are few and far between, and we can enjoy the way Dell’Anna takes command of situations, allaying the doubts and fears of those around her by refusing to consider the possibility of failure. With her in the role, it makes sense for a hardened prostitute in the worst part of New York to soften her heart, or for Five Points’ resident priest, hardened into a perfect lack of empathy , shows more interest in twirling his spaghetti than in anything she says, to meekly accept being put in his place by her innate dignity and the genteel, even respectful, way she steamrolls over him.
Mother Cabrini may have had heart in heaven, but she like the film, has her mind set firmly here on earth preaching and practicing what would late come to be known as Liberation Theology. And this is where it differs from those ci-mentioned hagiographies. This saint has no visions from heaven, there are no interludes of ecstasy. Mother Cabrini here is of a singularly Shavian cast. She, like Saint Joan, is doing whatever it is that God (or god) has put it in her head to do. And God (or god) help whoever gets in her way.
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