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Friday December 20, 2024

Movie Review: Conclave (2024)

WARNING: SPOILERS 

In an early scene, as Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is leading the conclave to find the next pope, he talks privately with one of the leading contenders, Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), about whether the previous pope dismissed him over dinner the night he died. Tremblay denies all, vehement and hurt (in that John Lithgow manner), and gives reasonable enough answers, and Lawrence seems placated. Then, at the door, Lawrence turns and asks “By the way, what did you talk about at dinner?”

It's Lt. Columbo at the Vatican. He does everything but say, “Just one more thing….”

Wouldn’t that be a helluva TV series—Cardinal Columbo? With reluctant witnesses, he can just tell them, as he does here, “Would you like me to hear your confession?”

I liked “Conclave” a lot. It’s gripping, and beautifully photographed, and Fiennes is wholly believable as a good, wise man in doubt about his own goodness and wisdom. It's a performance that seeps into you. 

Succession
Initially I thought it might be a murder investigation. But that’s not it—heart attack, old age. No, the movie is all about succession—to coin a phrase.

These are the early contenders for Pontiff:

  • Cardinal Tremblay (Lithgow), an ambitious moderate
  • Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), an unambitious liberal who is really an ambitious moderate
  • Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), a progressive in racial terms (he would be the first African pope) but regressive in other ways (he condemns homosexuality as an abomination)
  • Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a reactionary, who wants to undo Vatican II reforms and wage a holy war against Islam

Not a stellar group.

And it gets worse. As votes are cast, and black smoke sent out from the Vatican, mud is slung and secrets revealed. When he was 30, Adeyemi had an affair with a 19-year-old girl, and there was a child. As recent Roman Catholic scandals go, that’s hardly a blip, but it torpedoes his chances. Tremblay’s too, since it’s revealed he was the one who brought the woman to Rome to besmirch Adeyemi.

Meanwhile, Bellini has never been a popular candidate—too Stanley Tucci. Which leaves Tedesco? Whose slogan seems to be Make the Vatican Latin Again?

Not if Lawrence has anything to say. And he does. Before the first vote, Lawrence gives a speech to the assembled that ends with a paean to doubt:

There is one sin which I have come to fear above all others: certainty … Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts. And let him grant us a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness and who carries on.

My kinda guy.

Indeed, support for Lawrence has been growing, and one wonders if we’re going to get a Dick Cheney moment—the guy leading the committee to fill the slot fills the slot. Is Lawrence ambitious himself? Bellini thinks so, and I could foresee a moment when it’s all done, when, alone, Lawrence’s smile turns less benevolent. But no, his private face is his public one. If anything, there is more doubt and pain in his private face. I like a moment in conversation with Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), who insists on voting for Lawrence even though Lawrence is telling him not to. Lawrence becomes enraged. That’s when I went, “Oh, he’s not fooling. He really doesn’t want it.”

Benitez is a last-minute addition to the conclave—the archbishop they didn’t know existed because his diocese is Kabul. I wish he hadn't gotten that one vote in the first round. It immediately made me think he'd be last man standing. Which is kind of what happens. Lawrence keeps voting for Bellini, until he doesn’t; until, reluctantly, he writes in his own name.

The movie is big on the rituals of the Church—it’s a procedural in the investigative sense and even more so in revealing the procedures of the Vatican—including the way the Cardinals slide their secret votes into a vase before they’re counted. As Lawrence is doing this with his own reluctant vote for himself, the upper stained-glass windows explode, knocking him to the ground and causing lacerations on his face. For a second, it feels like God’s judgment, and one wonders if Lawrence didn’t assumes the same; but no, it’s human beings: a suicide bomber—part of the holy war Tedesco wants to fight.

It's Benitez, whose jurisdictions have been in war-ravaged countries, who gives the big speech that saves the day. While nodding to tradition, he adds, “The church is not the past. It is what we do next.” Beautiful line. Next vote, he gets the 2/3 majority.

The 14th Innocent
Did we need the final reveal? Benitez has his own secrets. The Vatican sent him to a clinic in Switzerland for … well, initially I thought he was transgender, but no, he/they are intersex (the outdated term is hermaphrodite). Though raised as a boy, a recent operation revealed a uterus and ovaries. In Switzerland he’d contemplated having them removed but decided against it. “I am what God made me,” he tells Lawrence. The final question for us is what Lawrence will do with this information. For a time, he objects. He broods. Then he smiles his weary smile and lets it all go. Benitez is, after all (as Benitez tells him), the very embodiment of the uncertainty Lawrence counseled.

Benitez’s choice of a pontiff name is interesting for a forward thinker: Pope Innocent. He would be the 14th Innocent, and the first we’ve had since the 1720s. Most were in the Middle Ages. But it fits. There’s an innocence to Benitez, and in his new place in the very patriarchal Roman Catholic Church. He's the clean slate.

Did most people know Fiennes has never on an Oscar? He hasn't even been nominated since “The English Patient” more than a quarter-century ago, so I assume he’s a frontrunner this year. It’s a beautiful performance. He exudes a kind of holiness.

And now for a confession of my own. Forgive me, Edward Berger, for I have sinned. I didn’t watch your movie in a theater, as you and God intended. I watched it at a friend’s home on their big TV. And they had motion smoothing on. Last month, I tried to fix their motion-smoothing problem, but like the serpent in the Garden, tech bros are the most crafty and shrewd of all the wild animals and I couldn’t find the path. After I realized how good your film was, and how beautiful it would look on a big screen, I checked to see if I it was playing in a nearby theater. It wasn’t and I wept. I will now say 100 Hail Martys.

Posted at 10:33 AM on Friday December 20, 2024 in category Movie Reviews - 2024