Cabrini: A Film Review

You should go see it.

This week, I had family in from out of state once more and I found my writing schedule rearranged as my precocious and adorable six-year-old niece followed me around the house all day long and talked my ear off. And when I say all day long, I do mean alllllllll day long. That girl has the gift of gab.

It’s been fun, but I haven’t had much time to write a piece of my usual length. Might I offer a movie review, instead?

Last night, we all went to the theater together and saw Cabrini, so I thought I’d tell you about it.

Mother Cabrini came to America in 1889 under the blessing of the pope to begin an orphanage for Sicilian children living in the squalid and crime-laden Five Points slum of New York City.

During the big immigration wave through Ellis Island between 1893 and 1910, over 2 million Italians came to the United States. By the time immigration had tapered off in the 1920s, that number reached around 4 million. Most were Sicilians. My great grandparents, Dominique and Antonia were in this wave, arriving in 1912 from Palermo, Sicily. Antonia was pregnant with my grandpa at the time, giving birth shortly after stepping off the boat. I know very little of their trip over, packed like sardines in the hull of a boat, but I can only imagine how miserable it must have been for them, especially my great grandmother, heavy with child in the last trimester of her pregnancy.

As a kid, I soaked up the stories my grandpa told about his own childhood so different from my own, but they were few and far between. He often didn’t want to talk about his past and that confused me. He could speak Italian fluently into his old age, but rarely did, even while my dad was growing up. He changed his name from Giuseppe Barbera to Joe Barber and married the whitest of white girls, my sweet and feisty five foot nothing grandma. It was as if he wanted to shed everything that set him apart as an Italian and melt into the American crowd. In the 1940s, he made the ultimate break by joining the United States military against his own country of origin.

None of this made complete sense to me until I heard someone claim that Italians weren’t considered “white” until fairly recently. So, I started digging around and discovered that Italians and specifically, Sicilians, not unlike most ethnic peoples who found and continue to find their way here, were quite universally despised when they arrived on American shores.

A lot of Sicilians settled in Louisiana where they quickly found work, and it was New Orleans, Louisiana, where one of the largest mass lynchings took place in 1891 —and not of black men as you might understandably suspect—but Sicilian men. You can read about that sad event on History.com: The Grisly Story of One of America’s Largest Lynching

“Dirty Dago,” “Wop,” “Guinea pig,” were all terms of derision for my Sicilian great grandparents. And not without cause. Not all immigrants were pure as the driven snow. (Nor are they now.) The Mafia caused real problems for places like New Orleans and New York—increased crime and prostitution to name two.

Into this mess, arrived Mother Cabrini with her brown skin and dark eyes and her little band of nuns as brown as herself, determined to care for orphaned Sicilian children in the slums of New York City.

How do I describe the filming? It was like stepping into a painting, in some ways. The shots were beautiful and I was immersed from the beginning.

The opening scene—a little brown boy desperately pushing his dying mother in a cart to the hospital screaming for help in Italian, his pleas falling on calloused ears sent me down memory lane.

A visual of my great grandmother lying on the family’s kitchen table…one of the kids holding the gas over her mouth and nose while the doctor cut her open and took out her appendix.

And then the time, when my grandpa, little Giuseppe, got himself on a streetcar, got off at the hospital, had his tonsils removed, got back on the streetcar afterwards and took himself home.

Our grandparents and great grandparents were made of stiffer stuff than we can possibly imagine. And so was Cabrini.

Suffering a near drowning accident in her youth, Cabrini’s lungs were seriously damaged and doctors predicted she would never leave her bed and would live an abbreviated life. She defied this prognosis until her death at the age of sixty-seven.

The movie is her story of personal grit, determination, hard work and constant battling for the welfare of orphaned children and poor immigrants, coming to blows with her own physical limitations and corrupt government officials in equal measure.

In a word, I do recommend that you watch the film. It was beautifully shot, the acting was excellent, the writing was effective, the story engaging and inspiring, the soundtrack interspersed with Italian opera and folk songs was lovely. Difficult and mature subjects were handled with care and there was no point at which I felt uneasy having my little niece sitting beside me in the theater. Even scenes of violence were handled sensitively and without excessive gore.

However, I do have a few criticisms.

Cabrini’s personal faith seemed downplayed to make the story more palatable for a secular audience.

This story presented opportunity after opportunity to display God’s redemption, but the movie makers never seized those opportunities. In fact, God’s name was only mentioned two or three times. The only clues that Mother Cabrini was a woman of faith were the scenes in the Vatican, her nun’s habit, and one prayer around the dinner table.

In a conversation with Cabrini, a young prostitute who had left her pimp and old profession confesses through tears words to the effect of, “no amount of water can wash me clean.” Granted, the Gospel will be approached differently through a Catholic lens than my Protestant tradition. But this movie offered no hope to the prostitute. Instead of pointing her to the wounds of Jesus, Cabrini gave the girl a more modern Christianity, “You go, girl! You're so strong and brave, so broken and beautiful,” pep talk by saying, “When I see you, I see courage.” A kind thing to say, true to an extent, but it has no power to lift a sinner out of the mire

And that was it.

That was all the hope this young prostitute was given. In the film, that is. I’m quite confident that the real Cabrini was able to give this girl an answer of considerably more substance.

Much was made of Cabrini’s determination through her limiting health situation. Powering through coughing and wheezing fits, working late into the night, never quitting, never giving up. All admirable traits to be sure. But very little was made of the enabling power of God. Cabrini was the hero, front and center. God was sort of in the background. I feel fairly certain that Cabrini, if she were alive today, would not be entirely pleased with this characterization. I feel fairly certain that she would wish God’s name to be glorified over her own. And I know this because of a string of her own words I discovered while writing this piece. Allow me to share some of them with you.

“We must pray without tiring, for the salvation of mankind does not depend upon material success…but on Jesus alone.” 

“I will go anywhere and do anything in order to communicate the love of Jesus to those who do not know Him or have forgotten Him.”

“I trust in you, my Jesus. I place my poor soul in your hands – mold me according to Your Divine will.”

“A single act of humility is worth more than the proud exhibition of any virtue.”

“My good Jesus, give me the grace to love you with all my heart and to serve you with great fidelity in this life so that I can be a grain of sand to build up your glory for all eternity.”

“Let us keep close to Jesus because if we lose him, we have lost everything.”

A human can only do good in his own strength for a time, but it will inevitably falter. Bootstrapping is not sustainable in the long run. Only divine intervention can sustain the work Cabrini actually did in the face of incredible interior and exterior adversity. The film makers seemed hesitant to show who the real hero of this story was—the origin of love, Himself, our beautiful savior, Jesus Christ.

There was also a sly attempt at reeling in the feminists with this film. It was intentionally released on International Women’s Day and leaned heavily into the theme that sexism was one of Cabrini’s main obstacles in the way of doing good. I found that rather silly. I found Cabrini’s last line in the film rather silly, as well, but rather than quote it, I’ll let you watch it yourself and come to your own conclusions.

In the meanwhile, I’ll point you to a really great article about Cabrini in the National Catholic Register called Mother Cabrini Beyond the Movie: With ‘Unwavering Love of Jesus,’ She Trusted Christ Completely.

All that aside, I really, really enjoyed the film. It was very beautiful and worth watching. The history was fascinating. It’s the first time I’ve been to a movie theater in about two years, and it was definitely worth it. (I’m a crank and I hate going to the movies, so it’s kind of a big deal when a movie interests me enough to break my rule!)

It was really neat to think that my great grandparent’s way was likely eased into the New World, directly because of her work on their behalf a decade before.

And now, here’s one of my favorite lines from the film:

“We can serve our weakness, or we can serve our purpose. We can’t do both.”

As a woman who has known significant physical limitations, herself, those lines sent a thrill straight to my soul, because I know them to be true. I have lived them.

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…

P.S. Welcome to over twenty-five new subscribers this last month! I’m so glad you’re here and I hope you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read so far.

Who am I? I am wife to former SC State House Rep. Jonathon Hill. I am a novelist and short film writer. My first novel, The Pursuit of Elizabeth Millhouse, is currently out of print. (I’m working on fixing that.) I recently completed my second novel, 27. You can read the first chapter for free right here. The film I wrote is available for streaming on Amazon: The Wednesday Morning Breakfast Club.

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I hope you all have a wonderful week! See you next week on Monday at the same time.