NATHAN WEINBENDER:
I don’t know what it says about the current state of mainstream film that Conclave feels almost brazenly old-fashioned, a PG-rated drama for grown-ups in which most of the action occurs through conversation. It’s a movie that uses the inner workings of the Catholic Church as an analog for mainstream political cronyism. But it’s also a pulpy page-turner of a movie, based on a bestseller by Robert Harris, and its tone is somewhere between a Dan Brown thriller and a highbrow procedural like I, Claudius.
The title, of course, refers to the gathering of the College of Cardinals, who have descended upon Vatican City to vote on a successor following the Pope’s unexpected death. The conclave is overseen by the taciturn Dean Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), who must maneuver the choppy waters of the various factions of the church while grappling with his own intensifying crisis of faith. There’s radical violence happening outside, but the cardinals are shielded from it, hermetically sealed as they try to come to an agreement. Instead of 12 Angry Men, we get 120 Concerned Cardinals.
It takes a while to figure out who’s who, but the race boils down to a few candidates. Stanley Tucci is Lawrence’s preference, an outspoken liberal who sees the church’s recent attempts at progressivism as mere baby steps. John Lithgow plays a populist conservative, while Sergio Castellitto is the sort of traditionalist who wants to strip the church of anything resembling modernism. And then there’s the cardinal played beguilingly by first-time actor Carlos Diehz, who has surprised the rest of the conclave by arriving from Kabul, and whose serenity belies the violence he has witnessed.
As the voting commences, secrets about each of these men are revealed, and the qualified candidates drop like flies. Conclave has the sort of plot that involves secret compartments and confidential documents, clandestine meetings and backroom dealings. There’s also a key role for Isabella Rossellini as a Mother Superior who will no longer sit idly by as the men around her manipulate one another.
Conclave was directed by Edward Berger, who also made the recent Oscar-winning adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, and he takes a busy plot and makes it digestible. The rich cinematography by Stéphane Fontaine uses the ornate architecture as a piece of the story, the characters swallowed up by deep shadows and blinded by the harsh gleam of marble.
The movie is maybe a bit too solemn, because this is ultimately twisty pulp in cassocks. But it has some lofty and even challenging ideas. It builds to a final revelation that at first struck me as dated, maybe even crass, but it develops into something oddly hopeful, a provocative message about what it means to have faith in something even if it has perhaps been corrupted. This is ultimately not a film about religion—it’s about political strategy, about what it means to compromise your beliefs in exchange for power, about the fine line between the law of the land and ideology and how one must inevitably influence the other.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.
