Sant'Agostino (2010) Online

Augustine is a two-part, Italian-made mini-series about the influential theologian and church father Augustine of Hippo. The piece tells the story of his life from a teenager to his death at the age of 69. The last few weeks of his life, with him living as a famous church grandee and Bishop of Hippo during a siege of the city by Vandals, act as a framing device for flashbacks to his life and conversion to Christianity. Much of the content for the scenes of him as a young and middle-aged man come from his Confessions, which is probably the earliest extant autobiography.

The film takes us in a fairly stolid but not uninvolving way through his stealing of peaches as a boy, his studentship in the debauched city of Carthage, his rise as a lawyer, his struggles with conscience and the nature of truth, his involvement with the Manicheans, his time as court orator to the boy Emperor Valentinius II, his conversion to Christianity and his disputation with the Donatists. Each of these episodes is clearly, sometimes slightly simplistically, dealt with and includes genuine drama and character development. The framing story is less successful, although the climax has some power: Augustine personally goes into the Vandals camp and delivers some Hippo citizens who were being held as prisoners.

Augustine's major relationships – with his mother, his concubine and Bishop Ambrose, who converted him – are well-drawn if a little sentimentalised. There's also an apparently invented character, Valerius, who is a friend of Augustine's from his younger days and stands for the dying world of Rome, as Augustine stands for the eternal City of God. Augustine's mother Saint Monica comes across as a little one-dimensionally sanctimonious and this leads to the major fault of the series – it takes a rather partial view on Augustine's Christianity, agreeing with him that it is The Truth but never really pinpointing why it is. Instead of a properly dramatised revelation of why Christianity is the way, the film substitutes posturing and welling, saccharine music. This is a shame, as the film does go some way to exposing why being a mere legal rhetorician or an elite, celibate Manichean is wrong. The debate with the self-righteous Donatists is well-done and dramatically reveals the Catholic doctrine of the forgiveness of sins, but this leads the film to rather humanise and underplay the austerity of Augustine's own doctrine of Original Sin.

Augustine himself isn't the most attractive character. He begins as a rather arrogant, egotistical man and continues there. Of course, this is part of the story's point – that Augustine is a great father of the Church despite his personal faults. This rather radical dramatic strategy gets a bit lost in the script's unwise choice to have his final victory underlined by its facilitating a soppy love-story between a young Christian woman who looks up to him and a Roman centurion. Nevertheless, the mini-series is ambitious, informed and fairly faithful to the life of the man. It does attempt to dramatise profound questions and an important moment in the development of European civilisation. If you can forgive it's tasteless and tacky aspects, you might find much that intrigues.

We saw the 73-minute shorter re-cut USA version "Restless Heart" and highly recommend it as a very good introduction to the thought and times of one of the greatest theologians of the Christian era. The screenplay does a masterful job of presenting not only the Christian, but also the social, political, and psychological problems of the time -- which, it turns out, were not significantly different from our own.

Technically, the dubbing could have been better, especially early on, but the story itself absorbs you, and you soon don't notice. Well acted, fairly well staged, and definitely worth trying to find in its limited (so far) release in the US.