C

The effect of institutional corruption on an idealistic young Catholic priest could be the subject of a compelling, if necessarily provocative, film if it were handled with some subtlety, but “The Crime of Father Amaro” exhibits the shallow sensationalism characteristic of soap opera; and by cramming into a mere two hours enough incident to fill a Spanish-language miniseries of “Thorn Birds” length, it winds up mawkish rather than moving, hectoring instead of instructive. Carlos Carrera’s film has become a boxoffice sensation in Mexico, but its success can be traced to the shocking subject matter rather than the quality of its treatment. It’s basically a modern variant of the sort of movies Otto Preminger was once so expert in concocting. They might not have been good films in any objective sense, but the hint of the scandalous attached to their plots usually attracted large audiences.

Based on an 1875 Portuguese novel but updated to a contemporary Mexican setting, the picture centers on the angelic-looking, recently-ordained Father Amaro (Gael Garcia Bernal), who’s on his way to take up his first post as assistant to Father Benito (Sancho Gracia), an old, established pastor of a parish in a modest provincial town. Amaro, it seems, is a favorite of the local bishop–among other things he was sent to study canon law in Rome–and the placement is designed to give him some practical experience preparatory to his returning to the episcopal see to become an important power in the diocese. His high-minded character is exhibited when the bus on which he’s traveling is ambushed by bandits, and he gives his own money to an old man who’s lost the nest egg with which he planned to open a shop. (Why he hadn’t been denuded of his cash too isn’t explained.) After his arrival, however, he finds the assignment fraught with difficulties. Father Benito proves to be collecting funds for a hospital secretly from the local drug lord, and when their cozy relationship is made public by a young journalist, Amaro is called on by the bishop to squelch the scandal by using the church’s influence to force the newspaper involved to print a false retraction. The young priest is also shocked by the pastor’s intimate relationship with a local restaurant owner, who also happens to serve as the parish housekeeper. Further trouble arises from the activity of Father Natalio (Damian Alcazar), a priest in a nearby parish who espouses liberation theology and has become friendly with local rebels; Amaro respects his passionate concern for the peasants, but must serve as the bishop’s instrument to force the rebellious man back into the fold or punish him. All of these difficulties fade into the background, however, when Amaro gets involved with beautiful young Amelia (Ana Claudia Talancon), the erstwhile girlfriend of the muckraking reporter who had exposed Father Benito’s dealings; before long the two are meeting clandestinely in the home of the parish sacristan (Amelia goes there supposedly to help the man’s mentally-challenged daughter), and their affair has the expectedly tragic, melodramatic outcome.

The overarching issue in “Father Amaro” is a potent one–how easily a young man can lose his innocence under pressure of his “professional” demands and his libido–but it requires careful, sensitive handling; and Carrera proves decidedly heavy-handed. The succession of seedy episodes almost becomes comical, and some of the secondary characters–most notably a strange, witch-like local woman named Dionisia, played to excess by Luisa Huerta–are more like caricatures. Bernal does a good job capturing the young priest’s hesitant manner, but he doesn’t succeed in bringing the figure’s varied motives into sharp relief; the fault may lie in the writing more than his acting, but the result is that the young man remains a fuzzy, indistinct creation– blankly handsome and emotionally opaque. The other performances are at best workmanlike, though Ernesto Gomez Cruz catches the easy worldliness of the local bishop.

“The Crime of Father Amaro” looks reasonably good, though it’s basically a spare, no-frills production. The problem isn’t so much with its body and with its soul. At heart the picture is more salacious telenovela than serious drama.

B

It’s easy to understand why Campbell Scott leapt at the chance to star as the breezily cynical, somewhat pathetic womanizer called “Roger Dodger.” Writer-director Dylan Kidd reportedly passed the script along to Scott when he spied the actor in a New York restaurant, and Scott, it’s said, accepted it gingerly, hardly expecting to wind up co-producing it as well as starring. But when he got around to reading the screenplay, he must have found it irresistible: Roger’s not only on screen constantly–he’s a driven, articulate, desperate, queasily attractive yet peculiarly sad figure. What more could a young actor want? It’s a virtuoso part, the sort that comes around once in a blue moon (just think of what “Swimming With Sharks” did for Kevin Spacey). And it’s perfect for Scott’s deceptively bland, boyish good looks and slightly serpentine manner, besides putting his ability to spit out rapid-fire dialogue to good use.

Happily, his enthusiastic reaction to Kidd’s work proves to have been sound. “Roger” is a slight piece–one of those talkathons that’s more monologue than anything else, the kind of gabfest that might actually be more at home on the stage. (As director, Kidd’s response is to keep everything jittery by using a hand-held camera throughout, thereby increasing the level of nervous tension with a minimum of fuss.) But though hardly complex, the character of Roger is one of those rich thin characters who may not change or grow over the story’s brief span but is sufficiently colorful and compelling easily to hold one’s attention over a two-hour period, though he’d be exhausting and unpleasant to encounter in real life. Watching him not only spew his obsessive, self-destructive bilge but pass it on to his virginal nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg, in a closely observed turn that puts his performance in “The Emperor’s Club” in the shade) proves morbidly fascinating–rather like peering at an odd organism writhing about on a specimen dish under a laboratory microscope. And this one talks a blue streak, too.

Like most films of this ilk, “Roger Dodger” is a very simple affair. We meet the title character, a fast-talking advertising man, having an after-hours drink with his boss Joyce (Isabella Rossellini) and a couple of colleagues. He rants freely about the differences between the sexes, earning plenty of laughs and groans in the process, and afterward shows up at Joyce’s apartment for some sack time. It’s clear, however, that she’s breaking off the affair they’ve been having, and equally obvious he’s not taking it well. It’s at this point that Roger’s nephew shows up, supposedly in town from Ohio to scope out the Columbia campus, and before long the duo has snuck into a back table at a bar, where the older man tries to instruct the kid in the techniques of snaring babes. Before long they’ve collared a pair of initially incredulous young women (Elizabeth Berkley and Jennifer Beals) whom Roger urges Nick to try a line of lies on. Andrea and Sophie, as they’re called, are hardly taken in, but they develop a bemused affection for Nick (none for Roger, though, whom they peg as a sleazebag); but when the youngster is unable to “close the deal,” from his uncle’s point of view, they move on to a party at Joyce’s place, even though Roger had specifically been uninvited from it. He tries to set Nick up with a drunken co-worker, but when that doesn’t work out either (and Roger is ejected), they wind up in desperation at a brothel. A couple of none too surprising revelations are followed by an amusing postscript back in Nick’s Ohio hometown.

“Roger Dodger” is an uneven affair, which tends to lose steam as it goes along, and except for the Midwest sequence, featuring some impossibly geeky high school kids, the later episodes don’t match the earlier ones. Kidd’s apparent desire to equate the shallowness of Roger’s character with the soullessness of his job doesn’t quite come off, either. But the sharpness of much of Kidd’s dialogue, along with Scott’s skillful seediness and Eisenberg’s knowing portrait of adolescent lust, make even the last half hour of the picture palatable. (The contributions of Rossellini, Berkley and Beals are fine, too.) Outside the theatre Roger might be intolerable company, but inside it he’s well worth spending some time with.