Joyce Glasser reviews Conclave (November 29, 2024), Cert 12A, 120 mins. In cinemas.
Edward Berger won a pile of Oscars last year for his adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. There is nothing quiet about the Oscar buzz surrounding his follow-up, another adaptation with winners and losers, the gripping tension of a war movie and an equally uneasy truce. Welcome to Berger’s sinfully entertaining thriller, Conclave, deftly adapted from Robert Harris’s book by Peter Straughan (Wolf Hall TV series, The Goldfinch) in his best script yet.
The fervent faithful might view Harris’s take on the election of a pope to be sacrilege, and if this is you, be forewarned that the film makes jibes at the luxury, pomp, hanky-panky, nepotism and cover-ups that the Papal City has always been known for. But Conclave is far from a send-up or satire. As well as showing the integrity of most Cardinals, the sublime ending offers the promise of a wiser, more compassionate and humble spiritual governance in the fraught years to come.
When the popular Pope dies of a heart attack, it falls to Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the Dean of the College of Cardinals, (Ralph Fiennes) to summon a conclave. Cardinals from around the world will descend on the Vatican to meet in seclusion until a new Pope is elected. We saw a bit of this bizarre ritual in Fernando Meirelles’s fact-based two-hander The Two Popes in 2019, but nothing like this.
The various members of the College of Cardinals arrive, each with an agenda. Each will be doing strategic voting to get themselves, or their ideological ally, elected. The frontrunners are Italian fundamentalist Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), Canadian mainstream conservative Tremblay (John Lithgow) and Nigerian Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) who would be the first African Pope, but one with an aversion to gender rights and a big secret.
Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci) counts on his friend Lawrence to boost his votes, because Lawrence protests that he is not in the running. By the end of the film many think he doth protest too much, but more on that later.
Bellini is an American Liberal who delivers a speech that would get him elected in San Francisco, but not in the Vatican. Later in the film Lawrence gives a speech about embracing doubt and uncertainty that is so soul-searchingly magnificent that if it doesn’t get him elected, it might get Fiennes an Academy Award.
Arriving under the wire to test Lawrence’s ability to practice what he preaches is the completely unknown Archbishop Benitez (Carlos Diehz) of Kabul. The mild-mannered, guileless and humble Benitez explains that the late Pope secretly made him a cardinal before his death, an explanation that stirs controversy amongst the many doubting Thomases despite Benitez having the CV of a martyred saint.
As the Dean of the College of Cardinals, the first tough decision Lawrence makes is to embrace uncertainty and accept Benitez. The agonising decisions inflicted on Lawrence do not stop with Benitez. If ever a man of God is being tested, it is Lawrence, ironically, just when he is having a crisis of faith and has decided to leave the Vatican after the election. But he has to get through it first.
One by one, the top candidates are compromised (no spoilers here, but you will soon be counting the ways) and it is up to Lawrence to explore the allegations, which he grapples with according to his wracked conscience.
The trouble is, after his Papal quality speech on embracing uncertainty and doubt, Lawrence’s stock is rising and he is taking votes that would otherwise have gone to a furious Bellini. The compromised frontrunners are equally resentful, quietly accusing Lawrence of eliminating them on conduct charges to bolster his candidacy. No one, it seems is buying Lawrence’s neutral stance.
But the former Pope told Lawrence that he was a manager, not a shepherd, and Lawrence knows that the Pope must be a shepherd. The more we admire Lawrence’s ability to balance pragmatism, damage control, integrity, forgiveness and fairness, the more we agree with the Pope.
Fiennes is nothing if not versatile, as a leading man or a character acter. He has played an achingly romantic severely burnt pilot in The English Patient, a Nazi war criminal in Schindler’s List, a senatorial candidate tangled up with Jennifer Lopez’s hotel housekeeper in Maid in Manhattan; a professionally and morally compromised war crimes witness in The Reader; Lord Voldemort, Harry Potter’s archenemy and Shakespeare’s violent Roman leader Coriolanus in Fiennes’ directorial debut.
Whether or not Cardinal Lawrence proves to be Fiennes’ finest performance, it is arguably the finest in any film this year. The sexagenarian Cardinal’s ruggedly handsome face emerges from under his zucchettos and birettas, and from out from his cassock and cape to withstand such penetrating close ups that we feel we are eavesdropping on his dark nights of the soul. Few faces in the annals of Hollywood are as creatively and unself-consciously expressive.
There is so much to relish in the meticulous details of this thriller – a who-is-it, not a who-dun-it – that to say more would spoil the fun. But it would be a sacrilege not mention Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini), the Cardinals’ caterer/housekeeper and the film’s official scene stealer. Her squinty-eyed conversations with Lawrence, full of hilarious innuendo, should be bottled in a reliquary and sold to the cinema faithful.
