Conclave (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) dishes up the hot pope-election action you didn’t know you needed. Inevitable Oscar nominee Ralph Fiennes and similarly heavy-hitting costars Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow don their steamiest frock-and-beanie fits to play cardinals mired in the thick of a heated battle for ultimate pontiff power, with Isabella Rossellini habited up as the most sourpussed nun this side of your worst mid-century Catholic-school flashback-nightmares. Adapting Richard Harris’ 2016 pageturner novel, director Edward Berger (of four-time Oscar winner All Quiet on the Western Front) makes sure a movie that consists entirely of heavily robed men talking in antiseptic Vatican rooms is far more entertaining than you’d ever expect.
CONCLAVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: As they say, the pope is dead – long live the pope. Easier said than done! Just ask Cardinal Lawrence (Fiennes), who was very close to the pope and tried to resign but the pope wouldn’t let him and now Lawrence believes it’s because the pope knew he was dying and wanted Lawrence, as Dean of the College of Cardinals, to oversee the election of the new pope. It’s a burden, but Lawrence is bent on doing his duty in as dutiful a manner as befits the manager of a process so secretive, we’ve all only been able to IMAGINE how dramatic and sweaty it must be inside those locked-off quarters and under all those heavy cloaks.
Inventory: There are 108 cardinals who travel from all corners to the conclave. Any sitting cardinal can be nominated to be pope. They participate in a series of votes until they arrive at a two-thirds majority. Unsuccessful voting rounds are signified to the outside world with black smoke spewing from a chimney, and white smoke when a new pope has been selected. Four frocked bros are frontrunners in this race: Bellini (Tucci), a progressive liberal, and Tremblay (Lithgow), a moderate, are hometown Vatican guys. Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) is an extremely conservative traditionalist from Venice. And Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) is a Nigerian conservative who’s a fnfth more centrist than Tedesco. Adding a wrinkle to the drama is Benitez (Carlos Diehz), who arrives from Kabul to crash the party. Nobody knew Benitez existed except the pope, who secretly arranged for him to participate, apparently from his deathbed. Curious!
This is a long way of saying that Lawrence has a lot of egos to navigate. And intrigue, of course: People are saying that the pope asked Tremblay to GTFO before he died. Others are saying that the pope said a lot of things before he died, and those things are almost always in favor of the claimant’s rise to popedom. Prior to the conclave, Lawrence gives an opening speech that harpoons the entire notion of certainty, just as men are about to use permanent ink to write potential pope names on paper in the process of electing a guy to eternal sainthood. Does Lawrence secretly want to be pope himself? We spend a lot of time with him, but we can’t be sure, probably because he himself isn’t sure, which just so neatly illustrates his point about certainty, doesn’t it?
Meanwhile, as Tedesco and Bellini and Adeyemi and Tremblay spar – ideologically, since I’m pretty sure everyone had to give up their weapons along with their cell phones when they passed through conclave security – everyone was even wanded and everything – and insist the pope told them things that nobody can verify because the pope is dead, we and Lawrence start to wonder what the deal is with Benitez. And what the deal is with the outside world, which starts to leak into the sequester because things are literally exploding in Rome. And what the deal is with Sister “Of Course Her Name Is Agnes” Agnes (Rossellini), because her brow is so furrowed, and she seems to know things. So Lawrence has to play Catholic Batman or Hercule Poirot and snoop around and find things out. Juicy things. Things that could really shake up the conclave like little metaphorical bombs, maybe. Something like that.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Conclave is like The Two Popes meets Clue or Knives Out, with a dash of 12 Angry Men (108 Angry Cardinals?).
Performance Worth Watching: Conclave is an all-timer for Fiennes, who now has, what, 30 all-timers in his filmography by now? How has he not won an Oscar yet? He hasn’t even been nominated since the damn English Patient! Special mention goes to Rossellini, who gets a step-into-the-frame-and-throw-a-hand-grenade scene (note: it’s not a literal hand grenade, that’s just a metaphor) that might secure her her first-ever (!) Oscar nod.
Memorable Dialogue: “No sane man would want the papacy,” says Bellini, telling on himself, because he wants the papacy.
Sex and Skin: Oh god no!
Our Take: Conclave is pretty clearly engineered to hold a mirror up to the nasty political divisions of the current world, but frankly, that’s glaringly obvious, and the least compelling thing about the film. It’s far more engaging as a surface-to-medium-level slice of Vatican intrigue, with its many plot curlicues and hard lefts occurring within a millennia-old tradition that’s rather mysterious to those of us living in the outside world (which the cynic in me wants to define as “reality”). Berger drops us inside the marble walls wherein occurs a highly secretive process of old men jockeying for great power, and I didn’t believe it for a second. That’s praise, not criticism. I have an idea in my mind that real papal conclaves consist of terminal bores quoting scripture and endlessly muttering about constancy and responsibility, not the backstabbing soap operatics of this movie, which are wildly entertaining.
Berger immerses us in the setting and plot thanks to his emphasis on details – the austerity of the surroundings, a character getting misty when touching the late pope’s dirty eyeglasses, the rituals of cardinals getting garbed up for official proceedings and the nuns preparing meals for these Important Men. The sound design is rich and enveloping, with doors clicking shut in echoey halls and Lawrence’s heavy breathing enhancing the growing tension of the story.
A story that, mind you, very much tests our suspension of disbelief. You’ll be swept up in it nonetheless, thanks to fully committed and nuanced performances that elevate the endeavor considerably. Fiennes is flat-out great as a man wrestling with what’s right and wrong, and that includes his own faith. You can just smell the duplicity within Tucci and Lithgow’s characters; they’re highly skilled at the more subtle arts of weaseldom. Msamati and Castellitto are the secret weapons here – the former enjoys a rich emotional arc, and the latter is sneakily hilarious as a vaping, bigoted a-hole. And Rossellini is the super-secret weapon who delivers highly concentrated hostility as a woman who sure seems sick of these men’s shit. I’ll be damned if Conclave isn’t one of the most riveting religious thrillers I’ve ever seen.
Our Call: White smoke! STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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