Le Pape de Greenwich Village

The Pope of Greenwich Village comes across as an attempt to bring into the extravagantly big-haired 1980s the type of early Scorsese films from the ’60s and ’70s about flawed heroes who are confronted with moral questions about their relationships with others while operating on the edge of the law. The result is an ostentatiously self-important film in which every actor and actress mentioned in the opening credits has at least one scene comprising an acting showcase reserved just for them. Naturally, Rourke and Roberts are in full-on thespian mode the whole time. But in their case and that of all the others – whether hopeless (Hannah) or outstanding (Page, Young) – it comes across as terribly forced, theatrical and ridiculous. Not to mention that the film’s episodic characters thoroughly outshine the leads, which is primarily due to the fact that, unlike the protagonists, they are not macho assholes who let their own pomposity get them into shit because they dumbly fulfil nonsensical masculine roles and are then terribly surprised by the outcome. The screenplay has a lot of potential when it sets aside the mobsters and cops and focuses on the two loser protagonists, who infuse everything with their bullshit. If it had contained a critical element, the film could have been a biting treatise on the myth of the American Dream. However, there is no such detached view and (unlike in the works of Scorsese, among others) we have here just more adoration of self-centred boors without a shred of self-reflection or any effort to problematise them. ___ P.S.: Okay, I’m raising my rating of this film because I have to admit that Roberts’s acting showcase, where he blathers on a street bench about the “artificial inspiration” of horses while making an enormous sandwich, on which he then proceeds to gorge himself, is such a goofily random and gratuitous performance that it is simply unforgettable. It definitely puts him in the hall of fame of distinctive gastronomic character profiling and culinary inspirations for viewers alongside the egg cheese sandwich in Birds of Prey and all of the dishes in Cartoon Network’s top series, from bacon pancakes in Adventure Time to the pizza in Gumball. (16/07/2023)