Francesco

Movie reviewers like to dismiss fawning biographical docs as “hagiography” — the elevation of the subject to sainthood. But what if the person profiled really is a saint? The Discovery+ documentary Francesco admits a few flaws and mistakes throughout the life of Pope Francis, but most of his actions support the argument that he’s the most Christ-like Bishop of Rome in recent memory.

Director Evgeny Afineevsky dives right in, starting the film with an elucidation of Pope Francis’s pleas for environmental stewardship that goes on so long you may fear the whole film will be about climate change. But no, that’s just Afineevsky’s approach: Take on one topic after another, at great length, and without much regard to chronology or transition.

Thus Francesco powers through climate, immigration, attempted genocides and the resulting refugee crises, and so on. The one topic that takes several segments spaced throughout the film is the clerical child abuse crisis. Lesser attention is given to Francis’s overtures to gay-led families and to women in the church — two areas where the pope has made progress but (unmentioned in the movie) still holds to traditional straight, male dogma.

Francesco is easily vulnerable to accusations of bias, for such strategic omissions and for the number of interview subjects identified with some variation on “longtime friend of Pope Francis.” But the idea of cluttering up the film with complaints from Catholic fundamentalists, climate change deniers, anti-immigration pundits, and the like is even more disagreeable. The film lets the pope have his say, in tweets, speeches, and direct interviews, and leaves his harshest critics to find their own media outlet.

Francesco is entirely topic-centric; it is not a full biography. There are glimpses of the life of Jorge Mario Bergoglio — his immigrant parents, his decision to become a priest, his early assignments in his native Argentina. But don’t expect Francesco to explain church doctrine, papal history, or the politics of Francis’s election (Pope Benedict XVI is included only in a quick cameo) or to deal more than passingly with the controversies Bergoglio faced as a bishop in his home country.

What viewers get out of the film is a glowing portrait of one man’s struggle to bend the world to goodness — full of “grab the Kleenex” moments — and that’s not a bad thing at all.

Grade: B-minus. Not rated, but PG-13 equivalent due to some harsh news footage. Debuts March 28 on Discovery+.