The late 19th Century bleeding into the early 20th Century was a turbulent time for the whole world, no less Greece, what with Egypt, Cypress, Turkey, WWI!
Written and directed by Yelena Popovic, MAN OF GOD tells the story of Saint Nektarios, a priest of the Greek Orthodoxy who, during this tumultuous period served in Alexandria, succoured nuns in Greece, was slandered and vilified before being vindicated and canonised.
Oh, yeah, Eastern or Roman rite, Jesus wept, the Catholics screw up.
How does one portray a saint. Aris Servetalis does a pretty swell job. Bowing and scraping, putting gymnastics into genuflection, stopping short of flagellation, certainly sacrificing himself.
Boys in his care at the school he presides over don’t have to take the blame for their bullying. Nektarios says I am the teacher, they are he student, I have failed them, so punish me.
By example, empathy should bloom. And so it does, but sporadically, because, yes, we are only human, and the blooms are readily strangled by the weeds of envy, choked by the creepers of corrupt power, pharisees and philistines that retarded the flowering of true Christianity.
Patriarchs and potentates trump pastoral carers, holiness must heel to hierarchy, the venerable to the venal, as plotting priests lose sight of the spiritual and topple into the temporal.
Even humanists impeded his work, loathing his aestheticism with an athleticism of atheism, finding it archaic and mordant to modernism.
Yes, Nektarios’ example does inspire and we should aspire. Not necessarily for Godliness, or sainthood, or beatification, but for determination, diligence and devotion. And not for a deity, but for one another. Amen.
Mickey Rourke is trundled out in the final few moments, some marquee value presumably, punch drunk mumbling, a broken man healed miraculously as Nektarios shuffles off his mortal coil and embraces the rewards of heaven.