Although it's not stated plainly in the film, I think that the crime of Father Amaro is ambition. He knows what he wants, which is to rise steadily up in the church hierarchy, and he won't let anything stand in his way. Gael Garcia Bernal, Mexico's hottest new commodity and a very good actor to boot, plays him as a feckless nice guy who gets into trouble over his head but basically means well. It's a pitch-perfect performance, accentuated by Bernal's boyish good looks and aw-shucks demeanor, and it's better because we are allowed glimpses into Amaro's soul; without revealing too much, Bernal shows us the automaton lurking inside that friendly face.

Bernal plays Father Amaro, a recently ordained priest who is sent to a remote town to assist the parish priest, Father Benito (Sancho Gracia), before returning to the side of the Bishop to begin his ascent in the ranks. Amaro is naive, but how could he not be, as he has been secluded in the seminary in Mexico City until this trip. We don't ever get a sense of who Amaro might have been before or during his training; we only see the go-getter who comes to understand and accept the difference between ideals and actuality, between what is preached from the pulpit and what happens behind closed doors. Benito is an interesting case: despite his vow of celibacy, he has a mistress, Sanjuanera (Angelica Aragon), who helps out around the church and runs a local restaurant. He wants to help the community by building a great hospital, but we learn that he's paying for it with drug money that is being laundered for the local drug lord who controls Benito enough to summon him to his hacienda for a private baptism ceremony. Benito rationalizes his taking of drug money, which came from the sweat and blood of many of his parishioners, by saying that the money is going toward a great good, the hospital.

At the other end of the spectrum is Father Natalio (Damian Alcazar), who ministers to a mountain community populated by guerrillas fighting against the drug lord's armies. He is the embodiment of Liberation Theology, a doctrine that says that, in addition to saving people's souls, the church has a responsibility to improve people's lives here on Earth. It seems obvious, but it is and has been a very controversial topic; it arose in the 1960s and 1970s in South and Central America as local priests' reaction to oppressive right-wing regimes. In this film, Natalio's involvement with the guerrillas ostracizes him from the Church leadership, who accuse him of harboring anti-government rebels.

In between these two radically different poles enters Father Amaro. He believes Natalio, but his desire to advance in the ranks overrules his personal opinions. We get a first glimpse of how far he's willing to compromise his beliefs when a local reporter, Reuben (Andres Montiel), prints a story exposing the link between the drug lord, the hospital, and Father Benito, in addition to covering Natalio's links to the guerrillas; when the bishop (Gomez Cruz) orders him to write a rebuttal of the charges against Benito but endorses the charges against Natalio, Amaro doesn't hesitate. It's clear that the bishop already knows about Benito's involvement with the drug lord, and he tacitly approves, even using his clout to help cover the story up. From this point, although I think we were supposed to see Amaro's downfall as a tragedy of wasted potential, I was never surprised at his behavior.

Trouble starts to brew when a local girl, Amelia (Ana Claudia Talancon), falls in love with Amaro. Amelia is impossibly beautiful and impossibly young. There's a hysterical scene where she comes to give her confession; she's clearly testing the waters, and his answers to her questions about whether certain thoughts and behaviors are sins or not are side-splittingly funny. At first hesitant, he quickly overcomes his qualms and commences an affair with her, under the guise of training her to be a nun. Unable to follow the church's restriction on a priest having a sex life, Amaro and Amelia manage to follow its restrictions on contraception, and she becomes pregnant. It is here that we learn the extent of Amaro's ruthlessness.

The film was incredibly controversial in Mexico, where the Catholic Church denounced it as obscene and heretical. Probably because of this, it is the most successful film in Mexican box office history. The church should know by now that banning something is the surest way of making people want to see what it's all about. The fact is that the film deals with some important issues facing the church if it wants to remain relevant: the Church's responsibility to its parishioners here on Earth in addition to the hereafter, whether or not to make the vow of chastity optional, etc. One complaint I had with the movie is that it quickly forgot about many of its political issues to concentrate on the relationship between Amaro and Amelia. Other than the scenes where Amaro visits Natalio's mountain parish, the film conveniently forgets the issues that affect more than the characters at hand. The movie's not really all that concerned with problems with the Church as a whole; it raises and then drops the hot-button issues outside of sexual ones.