When the wartime epic “There Be Dragons” opens in theaters today, it will cap a remarkable evolution in the popular representation of Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic society whose founder, JosemarÃa Escrivá de Balaguer, is the hero of the new film.
Set during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, when Escrivá was a young man (he died in 1975 and was canonized Saint JosemarÃa in 2002), “There Be Dragons” was conceived by Roland Joffé, the Oscar-nominated English director and self-described “wobbly agnostic,” who is hardly one to carry water for a group like Opus Dei. But Mr. Joffé offers a human and sympathetic portrait of Escrivá and, by extension, of Opus Dei.
That is quite a change from the sinister portrayal of Opus Dei in the 2006 film adaptation of Dan Brown’s thriller, “The Da Vinci Code,” which included a murderous albino monk in its cast of caricatures. Yet the cinematic shift is more than an artistic choice. At a deeper level it symbolizes a genuine evolution for Opus Dei, an often insular movement that many in the church once considered the bogeyman of the right.
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David Gibson–Opus Dei, in Hollywood and Rome
When the wartime epic “There Be Dragons” opens in theaters today, it will cap a remarkable evolution in the popular representation of Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic society whose founder, JosemarÃa Escrivá de Balaguer, is the hero of the new film.
Set during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, when Escrivá was a young man (he died in 1975 and was canonized Saint JosemarÃa in 2002), “There Be Dragons” was conceived by Roland Joffé, the Oscar-nominated English director and self-described “wobbly agnostic,” who is hardly one to carry water for a group like Opus Dei. But Mr. Joffé offers a human and sympathetic portrait of Escrivá and, by extension, of Opus Dei.
That is quite a change from the sinister portrayal of Opus Dei in the 2006 film adaptation of Dan Brown’s thriller, “The Da Vinci Code,” which included a murderous albino monk in its cast of caricatures. Yet the cinematic shift is more than an artistic choice. At a deeper level it symbolizes a genuine evolution for Opus Dei, an often insular movement that many in the church once considered the bogeyman of the right.
Read it all.