It’s quite a leap from playing the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar (on the Netflix series “Narcos”) to embodying one of the most highly regarded men in the field of global diplomacy. And for the Brazilian actor Wagner Moura in “Sergio” (also on Netflix), it’s clearly a responsibility he feels acutely: Firing decency and charisma on all cylinders, he gives Sergio Vieira de Mello — the storied United Nations diplomat killed by a truck bomb in Iraq in 2003 — as much soul as the movie around him will allow.
Returning again and again to the mound of rubble in Baghdad where Vieira de Mello and his associate, Gil Loescher (a sadly underused Brian F. O’Byrne), lie painfully pinned down, this admiring yet sluggish movie mostly drowns its political revelations in sticky sentiment. As two American soldiers (played by Garret Dillahunt and Will Dalton) tug ineffectually at the chunks of concrete that once formed the Canal Hotel, their fruitless rescue attempt gives Sergio time to muse in flashback over a life spent tirelessly championing the rights of the downtrodden.
An unwavering idealist whose humanitarian efforts earned him legendary status in global-diplomacy circles, Vieira de Mello risks appearing a saint. And the director, Greg Barker (fictionalizing his 2009 documentary, based on Samantha Powers’s biography, “Chasing the Flame”), flirts dangerously with hagiography.
The greater problems with Craig Borten’s slushy screenplay, though, are its extreme earnestness — Sergio’s lengthy conversation with a female Timorese weaver is a sinkhole of sap — and an overemphasis on the love affair between the married Sergio and Carolina Larriera (Ana de Armas), an alluring United Nations economist. They meet in East Timor, lock lips in a downpour, and their ensuing, soft-focus romance has the effect of smoothing away any narrative grit or sense of the cerebral knife-edge that Sergio walked with such skill. Even his meeting with the infamous Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary looks like just a friendly chat.
Moreover, the choppiness of the storytelling gives short shrift to the bombing and Sergio’s tense interaction with L. Paul Bremer III (Bradley Whitford), President George W. Bush’s representative in Iraq. Tasked with restoring order and enabling legal elections, Sergio and his team are appalled by what they view as the United States’ excessive use of force and human-rights violations. The two men symbolize the eternal push and pull between diplomacy and violence, and their relationship could have given the movie the intellectual heft it so badly needs.
“We’re mopping up resistance,” Bremer tells Sergio at one point, curtly explaining the rising number of detainees. He forgot he was talking to a man who had made a career out of doing just that, and without detaining anyone.
Sergio
Rated R for nudity and violence. In English, Portuguese, Spanish and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
