Sergio Review: Netflix’s Biopic Focuses More on the Heart Than Politics

For his first narrative feature, Sergio, documentary filmmaker Greg Barker turns to a topic he knows all too well: the life of the late UN diplomat Sérgio Vieira de Mello. Having already covered Mello’s career in a well-received 2009 documentary (also called Sergio), Barker uses his biopic to focus in more on Mello’s role in guiding East Timor to become an independent democracy (after breaking ties with Indonesia) and serving as the UN ambassador to Iraq in the wake of the U.S. invasion in 2003. In doing so, Barker avoids trying to cover the breadth of his subject’s life (as biopics often do) in order to craft a more personal and reflective memoir about Mello’s life choices and what truly mattered to him in the end. Uneven yet sincere in its execution, Sergio combines simplified political melodrama with a tragic love story powered by its leads’ performances.

The film picks up with Sergio (Wagner Moura) reluctantly agreeing to serve as UN Special Representative to post-invasion Iraq for what’s meant to be a four-month assignment, at a time when the charismatic diplomat is ready to begin a quieter life with his spouse and fellow UN employee Carolina Larriera (Ana de Armas). However, things go terribly wrong when the UN headquarters in Iraq is bombed and Sergio is trapped underneath the ensuing rubble. As he struggles to stay alive, Sergio thinks back on the decisions which brought him here, as well as his courtship with Carolina while he was working in East Timor.

As overused as the “Character in a biopic thinks about their life” narrative framing device is, it generally works in Sergio, largely because the movie continuously moves back and forth between scenes set in Sergio’s horrifying present and his more optimistic, romanticized past three years earlier. By doing so, the film is able to infuse the flashbacks with a greater sense of dramatic tension and foreboding than they would’ve had playing out in a linear fashion, while at the same time preventing the post-bombing scenes (where Sergio’s hope of escaping slowly dwindles away) from becoming overly repetitive and inert. Barker and his cinematographer Adrian Teijido further succeed in juxtaposing the different time periods through their lighting and color palette, painting East Timor in lusher shades to contrast with the visual harshness of Baghdad.

Because it focuses so much on Sergio’s romance with Carolina and the way it leads him to re-examine his priorities (including, how he approaches his work and has long put his job before his family), the script by Dallas Buyers Club co-writer Craig Borten avoids diving too deeply into the larger politics at play – especially, when it comes to George W. Bush’s administration and their motivations for invading Iraq – and paints what’s probably an idealized portrait of the real Sergio and his professional aspirations, even while touching upon his personal flaws. At the same time, the movie feels very earnest in its intentions and frequently addresses the hard reality of all the compromising and negotiating that’s required to actually aid the people who suffer the most whenever governments declare war upon one another. Thanks to Moura’s captivating portrayal, it’s also easy to believe so many would gravitate to Sergio, even when they’re challenging him the way Carolina (who’s similarly mesmerizing thanks to Armas) and those closest to him so often do.

Although it lacks the punch and impact of Barker’s work as a documentarian, Sergio manages to do what any respectable biopic should: providing the kind of insightful and intimate look at a person’s life that you couldn’t simply get from reading their Wikipedia page. If nothing else, it might inspire those who check it out to watch Barker’s Sergio documentary and learn more about his career as a UN diplomat – which spanned thirty-four years – and the many historical events and developments he was involved in mediating over the course of the last quarter of the twentieth century. As far as Netflix Originals go, you could do far worse than this romantic tragedy-meets political biography.

Sergio is now streaming on Netflix. It is 118 minutes long and is rated R for language, some bloody images and a scene of sexuality.