Movie Review: CABRINI

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: March 22nd, 2024 / 02:21 AM

CABRINI movie poster | ©2024 Angel Studios

Rating: PG-13
Stars: Cristiana Dell’Anna, David Morse, Romana Maggiora Vergano, Federico Ialapi, Virginia Bocelli, Rolando Villazón, Giancarlo Giannini, John Lithgow, Jeremy Bobb, Liam Campora, Patch Darragh
Writer: Rod Barr, story by Rod Barr & Alejandro Monteverde
Director: Alejandro Monteverde
Distributor: Angel Studios
Release Date: March 8, 2024

In addition to the obligatory “based on a true story,” CABRINI begins by informing us that, “Between 1889 and 1910, over two million Italians immigrated to the United States.”

The opening crawl goes on to say that, in America, the Italian immigrants were discriminated against, thought to be mentally backward due to their lack of knowledge of the English language, and generally given menial labor jobs when they were employed at all.

At the age of thirty, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini (Cristiana Dell’Anna) has already founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and is running an orphanage in the Italian countryside. This is quite an accomplishment, since when Francesca (her name before she became a nun) was a child, she wasn’t expected to walk or even survive, much less run a religious order.

When Mother Frances gets an audience with Pope Leo XIII (Giancarlo Giannini), she tells him of her dream of opening an orphanage in China. Knowing the plight of Italians in New York City, the Pope encourages Mother Frances to found an orphanage there instead.

So, Mother Frances and the women of her order sail in steerage across the Atlantic. They wind up in New York’s Five Points district, an area even the police don’t want to enter after dark.

Even those unfamiliar with Mother Frances’s history can surmise where this is going. Still, director Alejandro Monteverde and screenwriter Rod Barr, who together created the film’s story, make it a fairly entertaining journey. Yes, this does resemble biographies of the past, but CABRINI feels more like, say, NORMA RAE than a conventional making-of-a-saint drama.

This is largely because Mother Frances, at least as depicted here, is a crusader for social welfare, not for spreading the gospel. She wants to make sure that children have a roof over their heads, clean clothes to wear, enough food to eat, and a sense that they are worthy and loved. If she does any proselytizing, it’s not onscreen. In fact, as Dell’Anna plays her, forthright, ardent, inventive, and as she is written, we’d be inclined to follow Mother Frances.

Conversely, CABRINI presents the Church as being highly political, often more concerned about offending the wealthy than aiding the poor. This movie is definitely not a recruiting tool.

One curious omission, both onscreen and in dialogue, is Black people. After the Civil War, there were many Black residents of Five Points, but we see no Black children in the orphanage, nor hear mention of them in Mother Frances’s otherwise specific speeches about dignity for all.

At two hours and twenty minutes, CABRINI surprisingly seldom lags, but it does become a little repetitive. Sister Frances and her organization suffer a setback, she tries to get funding, meets resistance, overcomes the resistance, and then the same cycle reoccurs. There are a couple of moments where we get the sense that we may be watching a tutorial about effective fundraising. It is indeed educational in its way, but it inhibits the narrative flow of the movie.

CABRINI is beautifully photographed by cinematographer Gorka Gómez Andreu and filled with everything we need to believe it’s the nineteenth century by production designer Carlos Lagunas. We get the hazy sunlight we associate with idyllic outdoors settings and the claustrophobic interiors either filled with books or too many unwashed bodies to convey where and when we are.

The strong supporting cast includes David Morse as an archbishop who leans toward convenience, and John Lithgow as deeply hostile New York Mayor Gould. Other major players include Romana Maggiora Vergano as a prostitute who gradually becomes drawn to Mother Frances, Jeremy Bobb as a helpful newspaper reporter, and Federico Ielapi as one of the orphans who comes to the nuns’ New York establishment.

CABRINI has the virtues of triumph of the spirit films of the past, without the bang-us-over-the-head religious aspects that were sometimes part of those. If it’s not an empirical view of its subject and her life and times, it is a still mostly engaging look at the rewards of persistence in the cause of humanism.

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