This year, one Latino character is nominated for an Oscar—but played by a Welshman. The Two Popes, I should note, is a delightful film—a simultaneously warm and wry buddy comedy centered on Popes Benedict XVI and Francis, born Jorge Bergoglio in Argentina. Jonathan Pryce plays the latter, a casting choice that’s both thoroughly understandable—he is a dead ringer for Francis—but also quietly awkward to watch, especially as the film delves into Francis’s long, fraught history with Argentinian politics. Pope Francis’s compliance with the military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 is a delicate, trauma-ridden subject, and his relationship with the country remains fraught to this day.
Pryce’s performance in The Two Popes is clever, funny, and generally wonderful, although he did rely on dubbing from a native speaker for his Spanish lines. The film uses Argentinian actor Juan Minujín to play the younger Bergoglio, but much of the character’s moral reckoning happens later, when Pryce handles the role. Perhaps that’s why few reviews have mentioned the implications of the Welsh Pryce playing the role, both for the film and for the legions of Latino actors who would likely have loved to sink their teeth into a character like Pope Francis. It’s hard not to wonder what an Argentinian or Argentinian-American actor might have done with the character’s more meditative moments.
Then there are the jokes this awards season—and it’s not just that unfortunate Hayek line from the Globes, either. Knives Out, Oscar-nominated for Rian Johnson’s original screenplay, has been praised up and down for its smart, modern take on the whodunit—including from our critics. But for some viewers, including film critic Monica Castillo, at least one aspect of its humor was tough to laugh with: its treatment of the caretaker Marta, played by de Armas. The film, Castillo wrote, “has a tendency to exploit its story’s immigration angle, which left me feeling uneasy as strangers at the screening I attended laughed at real-life issues I’m genuinely frightened of.” Throughout the film, Marta’s employers consistently fail to identify where she’s from, lob racial slurs, and, at one point, ask if she came to the U.S. “the right way.” The idea is to poke fun at the film’s central family, the white, ostensibly liberal Thrombeys. But Johnson’s failure to give Marta any real identity or backstory as a counterpoint to their ignorance, Castillo writes, “perpetuates the myth of Latino homogeneity, that our countries and customs are interchangeable, mashed together to fit neatly into a census box.”
All of these things, however minor they might seem on the surface, add up. For all the lip service Hollywood likes to pay to its own progressivism, the industry has failed at the basic task of hiring and recognizing Latino talent. It’s become hard to even work oneself up into much of a fury because it all feels so…expected. And the urgent times in which we live only make it worse; at a time when deportation and detention of Latinos are supposedly top of mind for most Americans, it’s amazing how invisible any of their stories remain in film.
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