Conclave

dir: Edward Berger

2024

Who knew a movie about voting for the next pope could be such a thrilling and exciting rollercoaster ride of surprise and mystery?

Well, almost no-one, and this flick is certainly not really like that, even if the music, the editing and the camerawork tries hard to convince you that this is the most exciting thing you’ve watched since the early Bourne spy action movies.

It is a thriller if you think that it matters who is at the head of the oldest corporation / crime family in world history, being the Catholic Church. Few organisations have done more to loot and pillage the world, or to bring more harm to more people than the Catholic Church, yes, it’s well known, but I’m not going to belabour the point. I am instead going to show heroic restraint and not make endless references to all the children that were sacrificed for the pleasure of these awful men, and the grand scheme imposed to protect the perpetrators and shield the Church’s money from its many criminal actions and atrocities.

Instead, I’m just going to talk about this movie like it’s a movie, based on a book, with a beginning, a middle and a shocking end, if by “shocking” I mean something that barely raised an eyebrow for me.

The only change from the Robert Harris novel, as far as I can recall, is not the alleged shock ending, but the name and ethnicity of the main character, and the ethnicity of the mysterious Cardinal Benitez, being changed from Filipino to Mexican, which makes next to no difference for my money. But other people’s money is different from mine. More volatile. More likely to start croaking “woke!” at the drop of a pope’s hat.

Our main character / detective here is Dean Lawrence, and that’s not his first name, but his title, as the Dean of the College of Cardinals. Upon finding out about the beloved pope’s death, he hurries back to the Vatican, not only to shed tears, but to manage the election of the new pope.

I have to say, the way they handle the pope’s death in terms of visual representation is… something. It must mean something, because it’s depicted in such an almost comically unsentimental fashion.

I mean, we get the scene of a number of his nearest and dearest shedding tears and touching his hands as he lies in state, so we know at least most of them were fond of him, but then there’s this palpable shift when someone goes the equivalent of “Well, righty o”, and starts wrestling the papal ring, the Ring of the Fisherman off of his hand, so that it can be destroyed.

The pope is zipped up in a white body bag, and then I would say unceremoniously wheeled out of the building, into a van, and then driven away, in such a cold manner that it’s almost comical, as the film’s title is displayed.

I deliberately used the word “unceremoniously” before, because everything that follows is very much ceremonial, ritualistic and insane. Everyone wears a costume, every single person on screen, and some, like the extra fancy vestments Lawrence must be dressed in (by multiple valets) are beyond even that. So much gold and silver thread. What a burden it must be to be at the top of such a hierarchy.

This is patriarchy manifest in its purest form. Let’s not pretend the Vatican is anything other than one of the last forms of aristocracy, with the curious anomaly of it not being hereditary, and that as a kingdom, it herds together its vast wealth for the benefit of the chaps at the top, the consiglieri of the capo di tutti capi, the boss of bosses, being the dude at the top known as the Pope.

To call it chauvinistic, phallocentric, patriarchal is redundant. It’s the purest embodiment of exactly what it seems to be, the boys only club to beat all the other boys only clubs.

But it’s not Lawrence’s job to tear down the structures that have oppressed millions for centuries, including and especially women. He’s not threatening the establishment; he is the establishment. His job is to make sure the elections that decide the next pope are done properly, with no hint of scandal to taint an organisation never known for having done anything wrong whatsoever.

The next pope therefore has to be perfect, but only God is perfect, men are fallible and weak, and even the cardinals, God’s enforcers, realise that they’re looking for the least worst person, rather than the best one possible.

Lawrence’s good friend Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci, great as always / often) is one in the running, despite his protestations to the contrary, who doesn’t want the papacy, but fears what would happen if a hardline conservative gets in.

I know, I know, it’s comical to consider that there are Catholic conservatives, since the very phrase is tautological, but we do live in a world where some Catholic high-ups still wish the Mass was done in Latin, and that women / LGBTQIA+ people were persecuted more, and that their boys’ only club was even more boys’ only, and whites only too.

A conundrum in the horse race is that there’s an outright racist in Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto, who is great in this, and so Italian it’s hilarious) who’s going for the ring for the so called traditionalists, but there are Cardinals like Adeyemi (Lucian Msmati) in the running, who rules Nigeria and its Catholics with an iron fist, whose views on gays is that they should be jailed in this life and condemned to an eternity of hell in the next.

Hmm, decisions, decisions. Bellini doesn’t have the votes, but is distressed at the possibility of either Tedesco or Adeyemi getting in and fucking things up, and he lashes out at Lawrence, who he suspects is actually putting on a “golly gee, shucks, who, me?” routine in order to slide it in and get the popehood by default. There is also another option, being Tremblay (John Lithgow), who seems to be everywhere at once, and who has gentle denials every time someone seems to trip him up on something. He is ambitious, as are all the Catholics from Quebec, but is he too ambitious? Does he want it so bad that he’ll machinate some Machiavellian machinations that would make even Nicolo Machiavelli himself gasp and say “bro, too far”?

A surprising amount of intrigue intrudes upon the arcane proceedings here, and Ralph Fiennes as the manager managing everything, as the pseudo-detective in the middle of all this, is great in the role. He mostly doesn’t put it across as being overburdened by his office or his charge (to do right by the old pope by making sure the next pope preserves his legacy, instead of undoing it), but he seems quite sad a lot of the time. He gives a touching homily about certainty versus doubt, which not only made me think of the film called Doubt, that also had nuns and priests in various states of disarray, but of the fact that his speech is like the opposite of what the Catholic Church has preached for about two thousand years: Only we know everything, you don’t know shit, so get on board or get the fuck out of the way (plus pay us as well).

He is gentle in all his dealings with his fellow princes of God, and also with the nuns. Isabella Rossellini gets a surprising amount of screen time, and even dialogue, and she nails everything like she always does, because she’s great. She plays a crucial role not only in revealing to Lawrence who did what to whom, where and when, but she’s also, in her standout scene, unafraid to call out the cardinals in front of each other, laying their sins out for all to see.

And then there’s the soft spoken but steely Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), who was cardinalised in secret, and secretly ran the Church in Kabul? Kabul in Afghanistan? Since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, I don’t think there are any Catholics left there, but maybe this is set prior to 2021.

Irrespective of that, Benitez has served in places where Catholics are not welcome, and I don’t just mean Bendigo or Geelong (sorry, I tried not to make references to the appalling crimes and cover-ups of the Church here in Victoria, but I couldn’t help myself: Forgive me, invisible made up guy in the sky, for I know not what I do). Prior to Kabul he ministered in Baghdad, which also might not have been that much fun. But he is a cardinal, a prince of the Church who actually ministers to the community, to the vulnerable, to the helpless, and he helps them. He isn’t interested in gold clothing or covering up crimes – he’s in it to do actual good in people’s lives.

And yet even with him there seems to be some confusion, some controversy.

Nothing is simple, everything gets thrown up in the air, in some cases literally due to some bombings, but we have to be reassured, even those of us that aren’t Catholic, that these august, wise men of the Church will, in the end make the right decision, and choose someone who wants to help the people of the world rather than return to the time when the Church marched hand in hand with colonial invaders to rape and pillage the New World, and the Old World too, just for good measure.

It's well directed, and the cinematography is exquisite (there are scenes which you could almost freeze and print out, and they would look like the Renaissance paintings they’re clearly intended to evoke). It’s such a well made film, with so much attention paid to detail in order to not demystify this milieu, this strange world, and make it seem more natural or comprehensible. These are strange people and they live, like the bizarre scenes with the turtles, in a strange and rarefied environment, stuck in their shells where they feel safest except when the “real” world intrudes. And the acting, well, they’re all great, led so ably by Fiennes as Jesus’s best boy, bestest hall monitor of all, making sure everyone else does right or else. Again, I agree, it sounds like the dullest fucking movie about a bunch of old pale stale monsters, but I found the flick highly enjoyable.

9 times and yet I never forget what a crew of awful vampires they all are out of 10

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“I think again of your sermon. I know what it is to exist... between the world's certainties.” - Conclave