Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara

A child cries, and a nation falls. In historical drama Kidnapped, the child is Edgardo Mortara, six years old and the sixth son of Salomone and Marianna Mortara in the city of Bologna. The nation was the Papal States, the band of Central Italy under direct political control of the Papacy. In historical melodrama Kidnapped (Rapito), director Marco Bellocchio recounts how the fate of one young boy rewrote the political direction of Europe.

The Mortara case may be almost unknown to American audiences and may be little more than a footnote in history texts for most European audiences. Yet it’s arguably as important for 19th century geopolitics as the Dreyfus Affair or Dred Scott, a singular legal struggle that proved to be a turning point. It’s almost absurd: in 1858, police dragged Edgardo from his bed, claiming that he had been secretly baptized and that therefore he could not be raised by his Jewish family. Three hundred years earlier, this would have been seen as saving the soul of this young, damned child: but much as Pope Pius IX clung on to that idea, the more the backlash came from a Europe that no longer bent the knee to the Holy See.

It’s no surprise to see veteran director Bellocchio take on a forgotten corner of Italian legal and political history. He tackled similar territory in 2010’s Vincere (his biodrama of Mussolini’s first wife and how she was expunged from the history books) and a decade later in Cosa Nostra courtroom drama The Traitor. The emotional weight of the tragedy is born by Fausto Russo Alesi and Barbara Ronchi as Edgardo’s parents, each of whom responds in their own way: increasingly hollow-eyed, their bleak determination to get their son back becomes an examination of both parental commitment and a portrait of Judaism in post-Napoleonic, pre-Belle Époque Western Europe.

Meanwhile, the grand politics of the affair are carried in a seething performance by Paolo Pierobon as Pope Pius IX. It’s rare to see a dramatic depiction of Vatican City’s number one resident as anything other than a deus ex machina for the story or as the subject of an unctuous hagiography. Instead, Pierobon may have conjured up the most complicated depiction of a pope since Rex Harrison as Julius II in The Agony and the Ecstasy. He’s both zealot and politician, absolutely convinced of the divine rightness of his actions, both at odds with modernity and in its sway. Levity is rare in Bellocchio’s work, but there’s a devious gleefulness in showing Pius’ fury at the new, cutting-edge artform of political cartoons. It’s an enthralling performance from Pierobon, his holy hubris balanced by Filip Timi as Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, the adviser who can see disaster coming.

Yet there’s an inherent challenge for the script by Bellocchio and Susanna Nicchiarelli (Nico, 1988) because the story of Edgardo as told at the time was actually two stories. One is the scandal that set European politics on fire, about a family trying to get their son back from a Papacy that was out of touch and out of control. The other was the Catholic propaganda about a boy touched by the hand of God who became a vessel for his grace. The script seems leery of calling what happened to Edgardo (played by Sala as a child and Maltese in a postscript) what it was – brainwashing – and instead leans into the rapturous myth spread by the church.

It’s a complicating factor, reflective of the writers’ seeming desire to track the entire tale from all angles. Kidnapped never quite catches the ultimate geopolitical scale of the affair, instead getting caught up in minor details. There’s a lengthy diversion about the trial of Pier Gaetano Feletti (Gifuni) that adds little but length, and it’s hard not to wish that Bellocchio had seen a clearer line to the “story” part of “history.” The personal and political become one stodgy pile, made melodramatic by Fabio Massimo Capogrosso’s heavy-handed score. Bellocchio should be credited for shining a light on a forgotten pivotal event, but the real Mortaras deserve that light to be a little less dull.