‘Conclave’ is a gripping papal thriller that takes one big misstep
Perhaps no institution has as much baroque infrastructure as the Catholic Church, all of its rules and rituals are carried out in palaces. The highest and most elaborate of these ceremonies may be the selection of a new pope, in which the council of cardinals gathers in Rome in seclusion to discuss and determine the future of the project. The new film Conclavepremiering at the Toronto Film Festival on Monday after its Telluride debut, understands both the seriousness of the process and its absurdity. It’s a suspenseful drama that makes audiences wink a little more than once.
Manager Edward Berger and screenwriter Peter Straughan also aware that many viewers will see parallels in the film with secular politics, with its ambitious power plays, its sullen compromises, its greedy egos. At the heart of all that deceitful drama is a real decision that will affect people’s lives, but it’s easy to lose sight of that amid the glamour and circumstance, the games and betrayals. Conclave providing a moment of relief for those mired in election cycle panic.
At the start of the film, the pope has died. He was beloved by some as a reformer who helped bring the church into the 21st century. (To a certain extent, anyway.) His critics now want to seize the vacant papacy and push things back to the pre-Vatican II era. But the late pope’s supporters are determined to prevent that. Ralph Fiennes plays the calm Cardinal Lawrence, chosen by the late Pope to oversee the succession battle. A contemporary-minded American cardinal, Bellini (Stanley Tucci), is the top choice of progressives, while the moderate Tremblay (John Lithgow) offers the safe choice and Adeyemi is more conservative (Lucian Msamati) and Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) rally their support.
Tedesco was the front-runner that Lawrence and Bellini feared most; he appealed to the university’s reactionaries, promising a return to the rigid order of the old days. At first, it seemed they might have the upper hand. But there were more than a few surprises lurking in the shadows of the Vatican in October, waiting to be revealed.
Conclave It’s a bit of a mystery, in that way, as Lawrence quietly investigates some of the main candidates while grappling with his own predicament as a front-runner. Fiennes plays Lawrence’s stern moral resolve, increasingly complicated by doubt, with controlled force. He’s offset nicely by Tucci’s more relaxed delivery; it’s fun to watch them plot and bicker. It’s like watching Isabella Rossellini in a small role as a nun who holds a treasure trove of important inside information. While I wish she had more to do, Rossellini at least has a brief but effective scene in which she stands up as the voice of, you know, half the world’s population.
It’s a moment that gets applause at film festival screenings, not the kind of reaction one would expect from a serious drama about religious tradition. But Conclave designed to provoke a visceral response. As a composer Volker BertelmannThe score’s tension roared away, Conclave It builds itself up into a climactic drama and then cuts through the tension with unexpected arrows of humor. It’s a carefully calibrated thing, touching on authoritative grandeur while still holding its own in the realm of lively entertainment.
Because this is a populist mystery, there are bound to be some surprises. They are mostly modest in scale, revealing the personal histories that led to each candidate’s defeat in turn. But one late surprise, the biggest of all, sets the stage. Conclave into a whole new thematic argument, one that I don’t think the film is really prepared to address adequately. Perhaps that’s why it’s held back until the very end; the audience has very little time to process what they’ve learned or to figure out what the film is trying to say about it.
Conclave‘s final surprise is recklessly controversial, threatening to ruin the fun. However, that’s not necessarily the case. We can forgive a last-minute lapse in judgment because otherwise, Conclave is a treat for the soul, a film that stirs the mind just enough to feel meaningful. The depiction of a process that is unfamiliar to most of us would probably be fascinating regardless of the context.
Perhaps Berger could apply the same approach to, say, a horror film about the year-end critics’ group awards! We do a lot of the same things these hooded weirdos do: silently rally support for our cause before the vote, furtively writing on slips of paper, and listening nervously as the names are read out loud. Sure, the stakes are a little lower—I’d guess that fewer than 1.4 billion people are affected by the results. But, I still think it could work.
