Movie Review: Cabrini

Not all heroes wear capes.

But Mother Cabrini sure wore one! That is, if one believes in the accuracy of Alisha Silverstein’s costume design in the historical biopic CABRINI, about the life of Mother Frances Cabrini. And, truth be told, there’s little to doubt in that accuracy in this stunningly beautiful period film.

CABRINI is the follow-up film by the pair of filmmakers who made the independent blockbuster SOUND OF FREEDOM – director Alejandro Monteverde and writer Rod Barr. At first glance, the films couldn’t seem more different with SOUND OF FREEDOM being a dark, moody, and masculine work set in modern times and filled with plenty of action and suspense. CABRINI is a period drama set in the late 1800s and early 1900s with a female protagonist.

However, not only are both films about real-life heroes, but both of those heroes use their God-given abilities to rescue children who have been victimized, abused, and abandoned as lost causes.

The real-life Mother Cabrini was an Italian nun who founded her own Institute of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Not content to stay in her home country, she petitioned Pope Leo XIII to spread the word of Jesus to the people of China.

This is essentially where the film begins, with Mother Cabrini forcefully breaking through Vatican bureaucracy to speak to the pope in person. Initially, the Holy Father isn’t much more sympathetic to Mother Cabrini’s missionary aspirations than his functionaries, but her brashness eventually wins him over — with the exception of giving her the advice to go “not to the East, but to the West.”

This is how Mother Cabrini and her missionary sisters ended up in one of the worst den of iniquities in America. Five Points was a notorious slum in lower Manhattan that, in the 1850s, was filled almost entirely by Italian immigrants, who were looked down upon as being subhuman by other Manhattanites.

While Pope Leo XIII had told the archdiocese of Manhattan that the missionary nuns were on their way to set up a community for Italian immigrant orphans, the sisters did not find the welcome mats rolled out for them. Mother Cabrini’s first challenge was to convince Archbishop Corrigan not to send her back to Italy with her tail between her legs.

She is, of course, successful in overcoming that obstacle and transforms a ramshackle, abandoned tenement into her first orphanage. It is at this point important to acknowledge the absolutely stunning visual quality of the film.

The period details are brought to gorgeous life through the cinematography of Gorka Gómez Andreu, the costuming of Alisha Silverstein, and the sets by production designer Carlos Lagunas and set decorator Stephanie Q. Bowen all bring . There is especially great contrast between the slums of Five Points and the upper-class world inhabited by characters such as Mayor Gould and the opera singer Disalvo — the well-to-do men with whom Mother Cabrini continually finds herself at odds with.

Adding another level of authenticity to the film is the casting of Christiana Dell’anna, an Italian actress who has primarily appeared in Italian productions at this point in her career. A bit of the film is subtitled with the dialogue spoken in Italian, both in the scenes in Italy and some of the scenes among the Italian immigrants of Five Points.

Dell’anna is powerful in the role, especially in the way one can see the sadness in the disappointment of each obstacle she comes across. Yet, she does not despair as she keeps relying on her faith that she is doing the right thing through her ministry of missionary work, bringing the word of God to the downtrodden, overlooked, and abused in this world.

Although the film only captures the early pivotal moments of this inspirational woman’s life, the real Mother Cabrini would go on to found numerous charity institutions in the West — and in the East, as she originally planned. She passed away in 1917 and was Canonized as a Saint in 1946 by Pope Pius XII, the first naturalized U.S. citizen to be so honored

As of this writing, Cabrini the film can be viewed on the Angel Studios website and app and purchased for streaming on Amazon.

Watch the movie trailer for Cabrini: