Review: ‘Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara’ is a harrowing interfaith showdown

What does a battle for one’s soul look like? Perhaps a lot like the anguish that veteran Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio imbues in nearly every scene of his unblinking historical melodrama “Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara.” It’s about an Italian Jewish child’s forced conversion to Catholicism in the late 19th century, an actual incident that reverberated across the world when Pope Pius IX himself explicitly sanctioned the kidnapping as God’s will.

A great many ills have been (and are being) propagated under the banner of religion. But this wild and terrible tale of crime and power, pitting devastated Jewish parents against the venal might of unyielding papal law, is entirely its own emotional minefield. To the great credit of Bellocchio (“Fists in the Pocket”), still going strong in his 80s as a devoted chronicler of his country’s dysfunctions, he treats this material like the epic howl of authority-abusing injustice it is, as well as a battle of wills worth every moment of hushed dread, painterly composition and churning crescendo of Fabio Massimo Capogrosso’s score.

One of nine children born to Jewish merchant Momolo Mortara (Fausto Russo Alesi) and his wife Marianna (a heartbreaking Barbara Ronchi), Edgardo is only 6 when he is seized at home by Bologna police on the night of June 24, 1858. According to the Catholic Church’s local Inquisitor (Fabrizio Gifuni), grimly patronizing to the family’s beseeching Jewish friends desperate for information about the raid, Edgardo had been secretly baptized in infancy years earlier by the Mortaras’ former servant girl, who believed the baby was near death and needed to be saved.

Enea Sala is a child in peril in “Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara.”

(Anna Camerlingo / Cohen Media Group)

Their lives suddenly gut-punched by an institutional antisemitism manifesting as some cruelly unfair game of faith tag, the distraught parents make pleas, but to no avail — under church law, the boy must be removed and raised Catholic. Which in this case involves being stolen away to a house of conversion in Rome, where a confused child, still bonded to the nightly Jewish prayers that symbolize his mother’s affection, can quickly be re-molded through ritual, repetition and regalia, with the most powerful religious figure in the world as his second father.

Paolo Pierobon plays Pius IX as a reptilian, vengeful theocrat with his own deep-seated fears, borne of ceding ecclesiastical dominion to an increasingly progressive anti-papist world. But even with the abduction earning him reams of bad international press, he refuses to back down. During a game of hide-and-seek among the converted boys, the Pope mischievously shields Edgardo under his vestments, and it jolts us into remembering a similar earlier visual, when Marianna hid him under her dress the night of the abduction. The parallel, between a powerless mother’s survival gesture and a cruel ruler protecting his pet, knocks you flat at the same time that it creeps you out.

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Bellocchio, who wrote the excellent screenplay with Susanna Nicchiarelli, follows the story across years, long enough so that we see Italy’s balance of power shift. Enea Sala’s boyhood portrayal of Edgardo segues to the young adult played by Leonardo Maltese, who believably retains something innocent yet troubled as we grapple with his fate. The payoff is a wallop of a final deathbed scene, all at once brutal, stirringly defiant and poignant about the mysteries of identity and faith.

If the details of “Kidnapped” aren’t familiar, do yourself the favor of withholding an online search until the full thunder and rigor of Bellocchio’s dramatic instincts can work you over — equivalent to a lavish ’60s period costume drama burnished into an engine of galvanizing narrative intention. It’s not surprising that Steven Spielberg wanted to do this story for years, packed as it is with the stuff of childhood peril, an alien world, Jewish heartache and resilience. But we can celebrate now what Bellocchio, a driven old master, has achieved: a heartfelt thriller of intensity and intimacy in which getting saved looks an awful lot like being lost.