Review: Sergio (2020 – Film)

(Image from Netflix)

Life took over and while I kept on watching movies, I just did not have time to write about them all that much. But that is all about to change! I hope. I think. Potentially.

Let’s start with Sergio, one of Netflix’s 2020 launches. Sergio is a somewhat biographical movie telling the story of Sergio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian United Nations employee who rose to become UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and UN Special Representative for Iraq.

Directed by Greg Barker, who also directed a documentary on Sergio, and starred by Wagner Moura (also acting as producer), the movie (and its subject) had everything to work. Everything. Sergio’s fascinating story was always meant to become a movie at some point.

I have a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in International Relations and I am from Brazil, so of course I was THE audience for this – I was hardwired to look forward to it. And also hardwired to expect too much. After all, no Brazilian has ever gotten that far in the United Nations – Sergio was being propped up to be the next Secretary General even! How can this story not be amazing? And yet…

Wagner Moura does great work, as always. The man has no flaws. The production value is huge, they really went all out in this so no complaints there. I loved the parallel between the sea water and the explosion rubbles. But the script, people. The script.

I read a lot about the movie after watching to try and come to terms with what I had just seen and it was a conscious effort from the director/producers/writers to showcase a more ‘human’ Sergio and focus on his love story with his second wife, Carolina Larriera. Instead of making it human, it made it boring. It made it generic. And Sergio had nothing generic about him. So many wasted scenes on building their love story, including a gratuitous and incredibly long sex scene that added NOTHING to the plot.

I fully believe they could have made the love story better weaved into his life. Less gratuitous. It felt disconnected from the rest of the story we were watching. It was just MESSY.

I was also much more sold in the friendship chemistry between Wagner Moura and Brían Francis O’Byrne than the love between Moura and Ana de Armas. I thought his relationship with his kids was also more of a relevant commentary. And that is all due to script problems alone. The real life marriage between de Mello and Larriera was indeed very interesting, especially after his death and the way the UN and everyone just brushed their relationship under the rug and erased her from his story – something she fought very hard to get reinserted into and good for her. So they COULD have made it more interesting, they just chose the generic Hollywood path instead.

It’s pretty obvious that the movie disappointed me. Maybe I expected too much. My academic background forbids me to love something that didn’t do Sergio Vieira de Mello justice.

I will end this by saying that, apart from Wagner Moura who can do no wrong in my eyes, the showstopping scene was the one between him and the elderly woman in East Timor (played by local Senhorinha Gama Da Costa Lobo). To think that so many people around the world STILL feel like that and are being ripped from their ancestral homes or abused in it, it’s heartbreaking.