Conclave - Review Thread

If there’s one Oscar category that tends to be pretty consistently won by movies from major auteurs it’s Best International Feature, which certainly isn’t the be all and end all of international cinema but (in recent years anyway) it generally does get won by movies made by big name directors who garner critical consensus coming out of festivals. One notable exception to this however was the film which won two years ago, Netflix’s remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, a movie that certainly had a festival run and garnered solid reviews but despite its often grim subject matter it was a movie that felt like it was made with an eye for mass viewership in a way that international films often didn’t. Part of that was the fact that it was directed by a guy named Edward Berger who… well, it’s not so much that he was critically disrespected so much as he was critically unknown. He had a relatively small resume and I don’t think his previous films even got released in the U.S. and seemed to go largely unnoticed at festivals. So it was pretty hard to really put his All Quiet on the Western Front into a career context but it certainly signaled that the guy had some talent and could mount a respectable Hollywood style prestige film. He also seems to have leveraged that career momentum pretty quickly too because he’s already back with another movie clearly looking for Oscar glory with Conclave, an English language drama from Focus Features which looks at the inner workings of the Vatican.

As one might expect Conclave opens with the death of a pope and the Dean of the College of Cardinals, a Brit named Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), is summoned to pray over his body. Because of his position Lawrence knows that he’ll be tasked with overseeing the conclave that’s about to be assembled to select this deceased pope’s successor. This conclave will be particularly high stakes as there’s a contingent who wants to elect Goffredo Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a conservative hardliner interested in returning the Latin mass and who seems to hold some rather racist views. The more liberal-minded cardinals, including Lawrence, want to make sure they find someone else to counter him but are unsure who they can successfully rally people around. Lawrence’s preferred candidate is Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), but he may well be too progressive to build a consensus around. Another popular choice is a Nigerian named Joshua Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), who would have obviously been a historic choice but who holds fairly conservative views on certain issues himself. A compromise choice may well be Joseph Tremblay (John Lithgow), who held a prominent Vatican office at the time of the pope’s death. However, that choice may well be the most dangerous of all as Carinal Lawrence hears a rumor from a concerned bishop that Tremblay had actually been relieved of duty by the pope before his death for unspecified reasons but doesn’t have proof of this on hand, leaving Lawrence to figure out why that was before it’s too late.

The Papal Conclave is certainly a bit of a unique process in world affairs: a sequestered meeting in which people must reach a consensus about who amongst themselves should hold one of the most powerful offices in the world. It’s ostensibly a spiritual process but quickly it starts to resemble a political campaign with factions jockeying for power and trying to come up with ways to avoid splitting the vote and making necessary compromises. In fact during one secret meeting two of the people involved make this subtext text by suggesting that they feel like they’re in the middle of an “American political convention.” The movie does seem to somewhat dumb down the divisions in the Vatican and define the conservative and liberal factions in ways that more closely resemble partisan politics when I suspect that the actual divisions would take the form of more esoteric theological debates in the real world. Still, there’s plenty of what is essentially palace intrigue to be found along the way and there’s also certainly some interest to be found in the Ralph Fiennes characters’ dilemma as he needs to balance both his role as an arbiter over this conclave as well as his interest in making sure a worthy pontiff is selected, as well as his desire to select someone he agrees with ideology with his desire to select someone who’s personally moral.