Cabrini (film)

Cabrini
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Alejandro Monteverde
Screenplay by	Rod Barr
Story by	Alejandro Monteverde Rod Barr
Produced by	Jonathan Sanger Leo Severino
Starring	Cristiana Dell'Anna David Morse Romana Maggiora Vergano Federico Ielapi Virginia Bocelli Rolando Villazón Giancarlo Giannini John Lithgow
Cinematography	Gorka Gómez Andreu
Edited by	F. Brian Scofield
Music by	Gene Back
Production companies	Francesca Film Production NY Lupin Film Lodigiano Film Development Inc.
Distributed by	Angel Studios
Release date	March 8, 2024 (2024-03-08)
Running time	142 minutes
Country	United States
Languages	English Italian
Budget	$50 million
Box office	$7.6 million

Cabrini is a 2024 American biographical drama film directed by Alejandro Gómez Monteverde and written by Rod Barr, based on a story by both. The film details the life of Catholic missionary Francesca Cabrini, portrayed by Cristiana Dell'Anna, as she encounters resistance to her charity and business efforts in New York City. Cabrini explores the sexism and anti-Italianism faced by Cabrini and others in New York City during the late 19th century.

Cabrini was released in the United States on March 8, 2024.

Plot

In 19th-century New York City, an Italian immigrant boy, Paolo, pushes around his dying mother in a cart; when he goes into a hospital for help, speaking Italian, the personnel cruelly dismiss him.

Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, a nun with lung disease, visits the Vatican after multiple attempts to found her own missionary order. As a girl, she made paper boats by a river, imagining them sailing off on missions to other countries: throughout the film, she has visions of her riverside experience.

A cardinal rejects her proposal, but she insists on seeing the Pope. She tells the Pope she wants to help the poor in China, and that the world is not large enough for what she wants to do. He notes that no woman has been allowed to found such an order, allows her to, but says she should go to New York instead, since she will eventually cover the whole world anyway.

Cabrini migrates from Italy to New York with her fellow Sisters to take care of poor Italian immigrants, aiding an ineffective priest in the Five Points area. Her first night there, she has nowhere to stay but a brothel, let in by a sympathetic prostitute, Vittoria, who tells her to bar her room's door. Cabrini and comrades hear pounding on the door, and the voice of a pimp, Geno, shouting that he doesn't allow roomers for free, and that they must not sleep there again.

Archbishop Corrigan is not helpful, but when Cabrini shows her a letter from the Pope, Corrigan grudgingly allows her work to continue. Her Sisters successfully establish charity and hospital work, and take care of many children. She even goes underground at night to find some missing children, and coughs and collapses; some good Samaritans convey her to Dr. Murphy, who tells her she likely has only two years to live. Murphy starts helping her order.

Paolo, whose mother has died, and an older boy, Enzo, try to steal bread from Cabrini, but she invites them to dinner with the Sisters instead. When Geno tries to take back Vittoria, who has left the brothel and helps the Sisters, Paolo takes out a gun and shoots Geno, crippling him. Later, Cabrini makes Paolo throw the gun in a fire. Geno and a henchman later ambush Vittoria and try to kill her, but she knifes Geno to death.

Cabrini purchases an Upper West Side property as a children's home. Mayor Gould is hostile to Italians, and helps drive her out of the property: a city inspector evicts Cabrini and her group. However, Corrigan finds a formerly-Jesuit-owned property and lets her have it, though she must dig water wells there – which she does personally.

Enzo and Paolo go to work to earn money and help Cabrini, but a pump-station accident kills Enzo and others. Murphy tells Cabrini a better hospital than her order's would have saved many lives. She determines to establish a first-rate hospital, and buys an old building, with the aid of wealthy men from immigrant communities, Irish, Italian, Jewish.

When she holds an Italian-American festival fundraiser with famous singer Enrico DiSalvo, the police, spewing racial slurs, shut it down, and Cabrini is arrested. Corrigan orders Cabrini back to Italy.

However, visiting there with Vittoria and another nun, she gets the Pope to overrule Corrigan, although the Pope wonders about the tension between Cabrini's faith and her ambition: she says she wants an "empire of hope". She also gets the Italian Senate to give money to finish building the hospital. However, ruffians set it on fire.

She confronts Mayor Gould, implying he may be responsible for the arson. With the help of a New York Times reporter, who also helped her in the past with a sympathetic story about the suffering in Five Points (saying that even rats lived better than the people there), she gets the mayor to relent in his opposition to the hospital.

Despite her lung condition, she endures to the age of 67 and becomes hugely celebrated. Later, she is canonized, making her the first American saint (the patron saint of immigrants), with her order spread over all the world, including China.

Cast

• Cristiana Dell'Anna as Francesca Cabrini
• David Morse as Archbishop Corrigan
• Romana Maggiora Vergano as Vittoria
• Federico Ielapi as Paolo
• Virginia Bocelli as Aria
• Rolando Villazón as DiSalvo
• Giancarlo Giannini as Pope Leo XIII
• John Lithgow as Mayor Gould
• Federico Castelluccio as Senator Bodio

Production

The film was executive produced by J. Eustace Wolfington. Principal photography began in western New York in mid-2021 with locations in Buffalo and Niagara Falls. Production moved to Rome later that year.

Release

Cabrini was released in the United States by Angel Studios on March 8, 2024. The film was screened privately for the community of Cabrini University at its Alumni Weekend on September 24, 2023. It is scheduled to be released in the United Kingdom on March 15, 2024.

Reception

Box office

In the United States and Canada, Cabrini was released alongside Kung Fu Panda 4 and Imaginary, and is projected to gross about $8.5 million from 2,840 theaters in its opening weekend. The film made $3.1 million on its first day, including $500,000 from Thursday night previews.

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 90% of 61 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.4/10. The website's consensus reads: "Aided by Cristiana Dell'anna's performance in the title role, Cabrini is an uplifting biopic with a timeless message." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 51 out of 100, based on nine critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale, while those polled by PostTrak gave it an 94% overall positive score.

RogerEbert.com's Tomris Laffly, rating the film 3 out of 4 stars, praised it as "the kind of middlebrow, big-screen period piece that used to occupy our theater screens regularly just a few decades ago". She concluded "If the name Alejandro Monteverde is familiar to your ears, it's likely because of last year's absurd and highly controversial box office hit Sound of Freedom. Thankfully, Cabrini doesn't arrive with a controversy to its name... [It] is in no way a perfect movie, but a damn dignified one that honors the little-known efforts of these fearless women." Richard Roeper, writing from the Chicago Sun-Times, similarly stated "The biopic Cabrini is a beautiful reminder of the human being behind the name... The Italian actress Cristiana Dell'Anna turns in a stunningly effective, movie-star performance in a film that is reminiscent of old-fashioned religious biopics such as The Song of Bernadette and Joan of Arc."

Conversely, IndieWire's David Ehrlich rated Cabrini a C-, criticizing it as "A stodgy, histrionic, and impossibly dull biopic that drags on for more than 140 minutes despite being thinner than a stained glass window." He went on to say "Its dialogue is a stale mess of empty slogans in search of a character to support them, its cinematography smothers turn of the century New York under a mustard cloud of digital sepia, and its structure — credited to both Monteverde and screenwriter Rod Barr — is so absent a convincing shape that it might as well be a person with three arms or a t‍–‍shirt that only has sleeves." Variety's Carlos Aguilar was also negative, writing "[For] all that can be questioned about the makers' intentions, the movie's greatest sin is how lifelessly solemn and aesthetically dull it is. Equidistant from the shock-value slop of the God's Not Dead franchise and from anything remotely considered interesting filmmaking, Cabrini lies in a middle ground of mediocrity."

External links

• Cabrini at IMDb 
• Cabrini at Metacritic
• Cabrini at Rotten Tomatoes