Monsignor Quixote

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What would they think if they knew that some of the greatest philosophers and thinkers—from Dostoevky to Kierkegaard and Unamuno considered him to be a Christ character? The utterly innocent priest's wayward behavior en route—allowing the Mayor to try on his collar, mistakenly going to a dirty movie (even worse, chuckling at it! You talk about him at every opportunity, you pretend that my saints' books are like his books of chivalry, you compare our little adventures with his.

Like in the novel, the adventures of the errant priest ends up in a melancholy way, and as always, Graham Greene's catholicism gets the better of him. The two are actually a little like Don Camillo and Peppone in Guareschi's stories filmed with Fernandel in the 50s, and doubtlessly Graham Greene has been inspired by that couple.Greene's attitude toward authority has always been "problematic": A convert to Catholicism who has been strongly attracted by Marxism, Greene has struggled with himself to conciliate two systems that have traditionally demanded a high degree of obedience and submission from their adepts and are both in confrontation with each other's respective principles. This fictional character lived in El Toboso more than four hundred years ago, and everyone jokingly says that the priest is related to Don Quixote. The theological/political dialogue between Catholic and Communist is delightful in its semi-conclusion (or consent agreement between the two characters) that the priest is a Catholic in spite of the Curia while the Mayor is a Communist.

As with Cervantes in Don Quixote, Greene in Monsignor Quixote deals very much with concepts of fact/fiction, mythology/reality, legend/actuality and in both novels, those lines are both blurred and questioned. It captures the jovial whimsy of the original Quixote while including more theological questioning and still avoiding my major complaint of the original by being told in a brisk 200-or-so pages. But it's a wonderful film, the dialog is brilliant all the way, there are even more ingeniuities than usually in Graham Greene's stories, and the Don Quixote paraphrase is a success all the way, even unto the unavoidable sadness. There are two important characters in the novel: Monsignor Quixote, a Catholic priest recently elevated to the rank of Monsignor and deposed from his parish at El Tobaso and Enrique Zancas alias Sancho, the deposed Communist mayor of El Tobaso. Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.What I believe is that there is actually a plot, an improvised and jaunty one, running through the richly written conversations; that the deliberately old-fashioned prose is actually a strength in hearkening back to a slower, more leisurely time when people would have patience to talk and think and reflect and that Greene's queries into faith, belief and doubt have a mellow and poignant flexibility to them that makes them worth revisiting again. When he delves into quotations from classical scholars I’ve never heard of it gets a little tedious, but generally it’s enough to skip lightly over these passages and before long something livelier happens. There’s an earnest struggle against the rigid, hypocritical hierarchy that constitutes the structure of the Catholic Church.