THERE BE DRAGONS IS ANOTHER KILLING FIELDS
Roland Joffé, who won a Political Film Society award for The Killing Fields (1984) has gone back to a bloody battlefield, this time the Spanish Civil War. There Be Dragons is a biopic of Josémaría Escrivá (played by Charlie Cox), the founder of Opus Dei, who was declared a saint by Pope John Paul II in 2002. To tell the story, a lame answer to The Da Vinci Code (2006), Joffé invents a London-based journalist, Robert Torres (played by Dougray Scott), whose publisher commissions a book about Escrivá, only to find that his father, Manolo (played by Wes Bentley), was a longtime pal of Escrivá, so he sets up a tape recorder for the story. Since he hated his father and had not seen him for eight years, the film has two parallel plots, with confusing flashbacks. What he learns is that both men have “dragons” in their background—the anticlericalism of the Republicans that forces Escrivá out of Madrid and later sympathy for the communists and Manolo’s fascist leanings. Although the film tries to honor Escrivá’s gospel of forgiveness, the politics is confusing, and the war is gory. MH