"Gottes mächtige Dienerin" or "God's Mighty Servant" is a German German-language television film from 2011 and actually this consists of two parts of 90 minutes each, so it runs for a total of three hours and I guess they took this direction because the subject is pretty epic and with that I do mean the central character, but the Pope as well es Catholic Church as a whole. The director and one of the writers is Marcus O. Rosenmüller, a really prolific filmmaker back then as well as today. The O in his name is there to make clear it him because there is another successful filmmaker Marcus Rosenmüller. So much for the basics. The name Rosenmüller clearly implies that he is rather from the south of Germany because nobody whho originates from Kiel or Hamburg would be named like that, so I am a bit surprised to see he was born in Duisburg. Maybe his family is from the south. But it is not too important either. I was just wondering if his origin is maybe the main reason why Bavarian actress Christine Neubauer was cast for the central character. I mean she has been the lead in many films (God knows why, no oun intended), but leading a film like this her being picked for the central character does surprise me for sure. And it turned out as expected. She was simply horrible at times, probably did not even manage to get in more than five different face expressions in almost 180 minutes and she ws literally in almost every scene, so that says it all. Still props to Rosenmüller because his direction and also screenplay still made this a good film at times and he even managed to direct some scenes where Neubauer was not making the material worse with her lack of range. Most of the time, however, it was fairly painful to watch her because you could sometimes see she was really trying to make an impact and give a good performance, but she simply doesn't have the acting chops. So her performance here would only be 1 star out of 5. But the film gets two from me because aside from her, there are no major weaknesses and with a better lead it could have been an actually fairly good film.
This mostly has to do with Remo Girone, the male co-lead here. He is really good in most of his scenes and it was a delight to see him on screen. Actually, he played Enzo Ferrari in the most recent Le Mans movie starring Christian Bale and Matt Damon, so good to see him also being cast on a successful Hollywood movie. But now back to this one here. All in all, the script was okay, even if there were still moments of weakness there too. For example I thought the ways in which all the antagonists were depicted was really shallow, uncreative and lacked attention to detail. Be it the other nun who would not get the wine out of the clothes, be it Monsignore Wilson (that was really bad at times) or be it Mrs. Miller. The ways in which the filmmakers here wanted us to like the title character and not the people who opposed her for whatever reason were not convincing and showed weaknesses in quality character writing. But it would have been worse if it had been just one supreme antagonist because that really could have hurt the film even more. This way it was somewhat okay and scenes like the one when Neubauer's character is there taking the attention away from Wilson or how Miller (who of course gets along very well with Wilson) cannot remember Pascalina's name are not necessarily easy to stomach, but can be tolerated. And we get it, she is not good with people. Still, what could not be tolerated and was almost a negative dealbreaker for me was towards the ending when they turn her into basically almost a female Oskar Schindler. Now that was truly cringeworthy. Once again Neubauer giving it her all trying so hard to do justice to the serious historically relevant material and she came oh so short. They clearly did not do her or the film a favor with thiese inclusions, even if of course I get it they had to pick them because this was just such a crucial issue during the reign of this pope. At the same time, it was still nice to see how effortlessly Girone managed the challenging material. The scene with the German who warns his character that he could get abducted was also key. And Girone nailed it while Neubauer created a messy spectacle again outside before the German may enter. I felt a bit sorry for Hochholdinger there he had to share the screen with Neubauer in that scene. Nobody could have saved it really. So yeah these are my words on "Gottes möchtige Dienerin". All in all, they basically sank the project to the ground when casting Neubauer already before production started and even if the filmmakers here managed to save it to some extent, I cannot forgive them for that decision, which was just a massive failure. This film luckily isn't, but aside from Girone's performance and also the fact that this is based on real events and a real pope there is not too much reason to see it. It's a thumbs-down from me overall.
This mostly has to do with Remo Girone, the male co-lead here. He is really good in most of his scenes and it was a delight to see him on screen. Actually, he played Enzo Ferrari in the most recent Le Mans movie starring Christian Bale and Matt Damon, so good to see him also being cast on a successful Hollywood movie. But now back to this one here. All in all, the script was okay, even if there were still moments of weakness there too. For example I thought the ways in which all the antagonists were depicted was really shallow, uncreative and lacked attention to detail. Be it the other nun who would not get the wine out of the clothes, be it Monsignore Wilson (that was really bad at times) or be it Mrs. Miller. The ways in which the filmmakers here wanted us to like the title character and not the people who opposed her for whatever reason were not convincing and showed weaknesses in quality character writing. But it would have been worse if it had been just one supreme antagonist because that really could have hurt the film even more. This way it was somewhat okay and scenes like the one when Neubauer's character is there taking the attention away from Wilson or how Miller (who of course gets along very well with Wilson) cannot remember Pascalina's name are not necessarily easy to stomach, but can be tolerated. And we get it, she is not good with people. Still, what could not be tolerated and was almost a negative dealbreaker for me was towards the ending when they turn her into basically almost a female Oskar Schindler. Now that was truly cringeworthy. Once again Neubauer giving it her all trying so hard to do justice to the serious historically relevant material and she came oh so short. They clearly did not do her or the film a favor with thiese inclusions, even if of course I get it they had to pick them because this was just such a crucial issue during the reign of this pope. At the same time, it was still nice to see how effortlessly Girone managed the challenging material. The scene with the German who warns his character that he could get abducted was also key. And Girone nailed it while Neubauer created a messy spectacle again outside before the German may enter. I felt a bit sorry for Hochholdinger there he had to share the screen with Neubauer in that scene. Nobody could have saved it really. So yeah these are my words on "Gottes möchtige Dienerin". All in all, they basically sank the project to the ground when casting Neubauer already before production started and even if the filmmakers here managed to save it to some extent, I cannot forgive them for that decision, which was just a massive failure. This film luckily isn't, but aside from Girone's performance and also the fact that this is based on real events and a real pope there is not too much reason to see it. It's a thumbs-down from me overall.