I'm not prepared to pass any kind of harsh judgement against this film, because the DVD that Netflix has is pretty awful, and the American version is severely edited. From what I did see, however, the direction of this Francis of Assisi biopic isn't that good. Liliana Cavani, most famous for her exploitation film The Night Porter, directs this very blandly. Her casting is bad, too, and she seems to have made her choices for beauty's sake. After seeing The Wrestler a while back, I was left wondering who this Mickey Rourke person was, and when it was that he was a world-famous actor with a great career to which everyone refers. Having also recently revisited Rossellini's The Flowers of St. Francis, one of my favorite films, this film seemed like a natural choice. Rourke was indeed a great beauty at this point in his life. He's certainly not the gruff bruiser I know him as (from The Wrestler, Sin City, Man on Fire and Domino mostly). I'll have to see him in something else before I judge his earlier worth. He's not particularly good here. He doesn't seem to belong, anyway. Far too beautiful, and I wasn't convinced by his soft-spokenness. Helena Bonham Carter co-stars, and the rest of the cast is mostly Italian. I have to admit I was mostly bored by this film. It came off as a cheap made-for-TV biopic, though that could mostly be due to the crumminess of the DVD. The worst aspect is the electronic score by Vangelis. I have to admit I rather like his scores to Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner, but his score here does not fit and is brutally awful much of the time.
