Perhaps no organization has as much baroque infrastructure as the Catholic Church, all of its rules and rituals carried out in palaces. The highest and most elaborate rite of them all may be the selection of a new pope, in which the college of cardinals gathers in Rome to seclude themselves for deliberation and define the future of the enterprise. The new film Conclave, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on Monday after a debut in Telluride, understands both the seriousness of this process and the campy ridiculousness of it. It’s a suspense drama that flashes more than a few winks to its audience.
Director Edward Berger and screenwriter Peter Straughan are also aware that many viewers will see the film’s parallels to secular politics, with its ambitious power plays, glum compromises, rapacious egos. At the heart of all that treacherous drama is a decision that will actually affect people’s lives, but it is easy to lose sight of that amid the pomp and circumstance, the gamesmanship and betrayal. Conclave offers a moment of cathartic release for those mired in the nervous mania of an election cycle.
At the start of the film, the pope has died. He was beloved by some as a reformer who helped push the church into the 21st century. (To some extent, anyway.) His detractors now wish to seize on the papal vacancy to push things all the way back to the times before Vatican II. But the late pope’s acolytes are determined to prevent that. Ralph Fiennes plays the even-keeled Cardinal Lawrence, chosen by the deceased pope to oversee the battle of succession. A contemporary-minded American cardinal, Bellini (Stanley Tucci), is the progressives’ top pick, while the moderate Tremblay (John Lithgow) offers the safety choice, and the more conservative Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) and Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) rally their own support.
Tedesco is the frontrunner Lawrence and Bellini fear most; he’s the one appealing to the reactionary faction of the college, promising a return to the rigid order of yesteryear. At the outset, it looks as though they might have the advantage. However, there are more than a few October surprises lurking in the shadows of the Vatican, waiting to be revealed.
Conclave is something of a mystery, in that way, as Lawrence quietly investigates several of the lead contenders while grappling with his own uneasy status as a top choice. Fiennes plays Lawrence’s stern moral determination, complicated ever more by doubt, with a controlled vigor. He’s nicely offset by Tucci’s more relaxed delivery; it’s a pleasure to watch them plot and bicker together. As it is to watch Isabella Rossellini in a small role as a nun who holds a trove of crucial insider information. Though I wish she had more to do, Rossellini does at least have one brief but effective scene in which she stands up as the voice of, y’know, half the population of the world.
It’s a moment that’s earned applause at festival screenings, not typically the kind of reaction one would expect from a grave drama about religious tradition. But Conclave is designed to provoke visceral responses. As composer Volker Bertelmann’s turgid score roars away, Conclave whips itself up into high melodrama and then cuts through all the sturm und drang with sudden darts of humor. It’s a carefully calibrated thing, touching fingers with prestige greatness while keeping its feet firmly planted in the realm of rollicking entertainment.
Given that this is, at heart, a populist mystery tale, some twists are required. They are mostly modest in scale, revelations of private histories that fell candidates one by one. But one late-arriving twist, the biggest of them all, casts Conclave into an entirely new thematic argument, one I don’t think the movie is really prepared to adequately address. Maybe that’s why it’s saved for the very end; the audience has very little time to process what they’ve learned or to suss out just what the movie is trying to say about it.
Conclave’s final surprise courts controversy in reckless fashion, threatening to ruin the good time. It doesn’t quite, though. We can forgive a last-minute error in judgment because otherwise, Conclave is a literate treat, a movie that stirs the mind just enough to feel substantial. Its depiction of a process foreign to most of us would be compelling perhaps no matter the setting.
Perhaps Berger could next apply the same treatment to, say, a thriller about end-of-the-year critics’ group awards! We do many of the same things as these cassocked weirdos: quietly drumming up support for our cause ahead of the vote, furtively writing on pieces of paper and listening anxiously as names are read aloud. Sure, the stakes are a bit lower—I would guess that slightly less than 1.4 billion people are touched by the outcome. But, still, I think it could work.