The early scenes of “Sergio,” a convoluted political biopic that hits Netflix Friday, suggest a movie that would have rather been a documentary in its telling about a Brazilian-born diplomat killed in a terrorist attack in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. A quick glance at director Greg Barker’s filmography and you’ll spot that – aha! – the experienced documentarian made one in 2009 of the same name and subject matter for HBO, to the tune of an Emmy nomination. It’s natural to wonder: Is Barker’s fascination that acute, or does the familiar material simply make for stable ground on which the director can create his first narrative feature?
Arriving in Baghdad as George W. Bush declares a new era and recycled newsreel catches the viewer up (or throws us back), Sergio Vieira de Mello is a United Nations representative on a mission—and he’d rather it be accomplished on its own terms, and not those of White House envoys. How his assignment to bring things under control will end isn’t a mystery the movie dangles over the viewer. It’s in the first five minutes that we see him gasping for breath under rubble, sparking a “Ladder 49”-style structure as the fragmented film skips through years and cinematic tones, turning recent history into a game of hopscotch as it struggles to compromise intimate observations of its title character with the admirable goal of educating us about a rare caliber of sympathetic political deal-broker.
Tapping Wagner Moura of “Narcos” fame for the lead role, Barker’s “Sergio” redux gambles historical clarity for melodrama, specifically the evolution of a romantic relationship with fellow humanitarian Carolina Larriera (Ana de Armas, in pre-breakout mode). The two brush shoulders and produce an increasing number of sparks through the years in South America, East Timor and Iraq as we get a more robust picture of Sergio’s resume. But because Barker has so much about the man’s life on his mind (and with perfectly good intentions) neither its professional nor personal aspects ever feel fully-realized. You can feel his documentarian sensibilities tugging against newfound dramatic ones.
In some parts, it makes for insightful surface-level examination of a figure that Moura plays with authority and charm, like when he instructs American soldiers not to guard UN Headquarters in Baghdad. He’s a bold operative, for whom image supersedes security.
But other scenes in “Sergio” are confounding. This might be the first film I’ve seen in which a moment of bureaucratic fretting over the impossibility of independence is promptly followed by a passionate kiss. Later, a hard-R sex scene sprouts in the middle of the otherwise chaste film like it snuck in from an erotic thriller. Barker and his screenwriter – Craig Borten, who previously worked on “Dallas Buyers Club” – clearly see Sergio as a complicated figure worth exploring, but the jarring tonal shifts and insistence on telling the story out of order undermine what should be striking emotional details.
The movie would have us believe Sergio is a consul driven by empathy, and one of its more thoughtful suggestions is that reaching super-egalitarian status demands a lack of domestic attention. But it’s rarely ever more than a suggestion.
As “Sergio” goes through its two-hour runtime, the more its priorities are clearly of the romantically sweeping variety than of the straight-faced, observational one. The jigsaw’d construction sets up a series of ultimatums between Sergio and Carolina, and while Moura and de Armas have fine chemistry, no scene between them feels as powerful as an aside around the movie’s midpoint, when attention briefly pivots to the everyday person impacted by Sergio’s political maneuvers. “If I tell you what I want, I don’t think you’d understand,” a lower-class East Timor woman tells him as he kneels beside her. Her face and station fill the frame, even though the movie has relegated the perspective of the common public to the background up to this point. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that here we see some of the best acting from Moura’s latest performance; the sentimental figure that so interests Barker begins to well up with tears behind his crisp Oxford shirt and dark slacks. In trying to paint the portrait of a man consumed by his work, “Sergio” is mostly a tangle of scribbles, but more scenes like this one would have sharpened the movie’s intentions.
Still, the final rugged moments provide an emphatically cruel twist of the knife, a hint that perhaps Sergio’s reputable humanism was never meant to be long for the new political landscape of 2003. In a way, the film’s undercoming are similar to Sergio’s—there’s more complexity than he’s morally equipped to handle.
For all intents and purposes, “Sergio” is a movie attempting to humanize and de-politicize politics. It’s a hell of a time to give that a try. In the age of the coronavirus and news coverage about lack of bureaucratic preparation, a more focused “Sergio” could be seen as either the cruelest irony or a necessary tonic. Barker’s version unfortunately doesn’t have the fortitude to come across strongly as either.
"Sergio" is rated R for language, some bloody images and a scene of sexuality. It begins streaming on Netflix Friday.
Starring: Wagner Moura, Ana de Armas, Brian F. O'Byrne, Garret Dillahunt
Directed by Greg Barker
2020
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