The Letters (2015) *

Directed by:  William Riead

Starring:  Juliet Stevenson, Max von Sydow, Rutger Hauer

Mother Teresa deserves a better biopic than The Letters, a painfully boring slog through her years teaching and helping the poor in Calcutta, India.      There is a good biopic to be made about Mother Teresa, I'm sure, but The Letters is not it.     There is no juice here.     It approaches its subject with such solemnity and lack of insight that it simply bores, not edifies.      Her story is approached with the depth of a Wikipedia page.   

There are good talents wasted here.    Juliet Stevenson plays Mother Teresa and is an accomplished British stage and screen actress.     The film captures the essence of poverty-stricken Calcutta during India's independence from Great Britain and beyond, but the Mother Teresa of this film is not given much of a personality.     She is too quiet, timid, and passive to be the nun who defied Hindu suspicions and hostility to become the world-renowned helper of the poor.      She is written as someone who exudes too much humility and has the body language of someone who would like nothing more than to disappear from the screen.      She does not speak nor act like a person who is carrying out God's will with great passion and desire, but more like someone who lost a game of rock, paper, scissors.  

The Letters of the title refers to the series of letters Mother Teresa wrote over the years to her spiritual advisor Father van Exem (von Sydow) expressing her doubts and fears.     These letters are read to a Vatican priest (Hauer) who is investigating the late Mother Teresa as a candidate for sainthood.      In the Catholic faith, a person must be responsible for at least two verifiable miracles in order to be canonized.      The first miracle take place after Mother Teresa's death in 1997, in which a woman dying from a tumor finds it has disappeared after holding a picture of the late nun.      To me, Mother Teresa's life work and sacrifice should make her a saint automatically, but they're not my rules.

van Exem reads passages of the letters to the priest.     Mother Teresa feels strongly sometimes that God had abandoned her.     He compels her to abandon her calling as a teacher in Calcutta to venture outside the school walls to live among the poor, according to her testimony.     She believed it, so it was what it was.    I suppose after living in squalor that many would have the same doubts.     The resistance she received from the locals is reason enough to have doubts.     Yet, perhaps because of the storytelling device, her troubles do not resonate with us.    We hear about them without actually feeling them.   

The Letters does not carry the power of Mother Teresa's story, in which she sacrificed a life of relative safety and comfort to pursue her true calling as told to her by God.     We see a general outline, Vatican politics, and historical perspective, but nothing underneath.     In one bizarre sequence, two reporters are discussing India's independence from Great Britain by asking, "So, do you think India is going to suffer under the burden of its birth as a modern nation?"    I have been involved in many political discussions over the years.     Not once did I encounter someone who spoke like that.     It sounds like an essay question on a college exam, minus the informal "so".  

Mother Teresa's life and work should be the subject of a better, more comprehensive study than The Letters.     The trouble is, Hollywood executives might shy away from another Mother Teresa biopic because this one was made and look how it turned out.     We have had two Steve Jobs biopics in the last three years, plus two documentaries made since his death in 2011.    I think another shot at a Mother Teresa biopic isn't asking too much.