Everyone deserves a break following a long and hard campaign (for both battles fought on the plains of France or in the hearts of Oscar voters), and after returning from the Western Front, Edward Berger chose to spend his at Church. His adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic – the first in modern times – proved to be a surprising success, and, understandably, he’d want to move away from literal bomb blasts to moral bombast, exploring the conflicts that lay within the heart of a “Good Soldier” in an entirely different theater of war. Given our continual fascination with the depths of the Catholic tradition (in my ill-informed view, Vatican II tore down the initial linguistic barricades, secularization engendered curiosity from the public, and scandal stripped the Church of the moral authority that mobilized protests against Martin Scorsese). Studios’ willingness to finance any award-season release involving the Pope, this adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novel Conclave is a surprisingly natural fit for both Berger and a Focus banner-ad campaign on Deadline’s homepage come January. I’m being facetiously cynical, of course – Berger’s film is more than an attempt to get the Downton Abbey crowd back into theaters – but the time was right, and the purses were open for a stately and graceful political drama like this, especially as we leap headlong into November hell.
The Pope is dead; long live the Pope. Such is the inciting incident that introduces us to Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the Dean of the College of Cardinals, and grants him his grand task: To find the replacement for the Church’s leader. Lawrence was close to his Holy Father, though a certain amount of conflict marked their final days together (Lawrence wanted to return to a parish, the Pope wanted him to remain in his position), and organizing the Pontiff’s election is a herculean task, made even more difficult by his grief. As they enter the sequester, Lawrence is working with a group of fellow cardinals to elect his friend Bellini (Stanley Tucci), an American who doesn’t want the papacy but deeply believes in the Church’s continual liberalization. This is in contrast to the three conservative frontrunners: Trembley (John Lithgow), a Canadian wheeler-and-dealer; Adeyemi (Lucien Msamati), a Nigerian with some secrets in his past; and Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), an Italian firebrand who embodies everything that Lawrence hates about the retrograde elements of the faith.
Along with the usual chaos – the preparations for the sequestered Cardinals to be shielded from the prying eyes of the public, the late arrivals, the precision execution of the rituals – there’s a lone straggler, Benetiz (Carlos Diehz), the Mexican-born bishop of Kabul, selected for the College, in secret, by the late Pope. But there’s one other thing – a sweaty, alcoholic priest comes to Lawrence at the last possible minute and tells him that Trembley was stripped of his positions in his final meeting with the Pontiff due to some amount of scandal. This lights a fire under the Cardinal, a just one that he’s still very resistant to and skeptical of. It’s his task to ensure that the Church selects the best possible candidate, and he takes that quite seriously, pursuing leads with a dogged conviction and a fair amount of doubt. Everyone aside from Tedesco, it seems, has secrets, and everyone has a different reason for their disqualification if the proof is there. So, Lawrence continues his investigations between ballots until a decision is made – one with a certain amount of dramatic consequence, executed with precise humor by Berger. There’s no good way to do this, so I’d just also like to shout out Isabella Rossellini, who plays Sister Agnes, the caterer, and housekeeper for the gathered Cardinals, as she has one of the film’s best moments, and whose part in the plot is deep enough into spoiler territory that it is impossible to put in a slight synopsis like this.
Berger’s direction is stately and pontifical, occasionally bordering on portentous, which isn’t a bug as much as it is an attempt to strike an appropriately catholic vibe. The fusion of the ornamental and the spartan has defined its religious tradition for centuries, and he’s particularly good at striking the conflicts that arise when modernity encroaches upon it, with a keen eye for rich and interesting minor details. The chain-smoking cardinals scrolling through their iPhones, the automatic single-serve coffeemakers that the Vatican lines the college’s dormitories with, and, most amusingly, Tedesco’s cherry-red vape, which he hits even in seclusion. It’s a funny way of illustrating the Church’s comfort with the present day, as long as it presents itself as a life-easing benefit rather than a perceived political albatross. Less intriguing are his attempts to articulate the theological conflicts between the candidates – we get a lot of speeches, which makes a certain amount of practical and logical sense for the environment, but aside from Tucci, we rarely get close enough to these people to see how they practice and apply their beliefs. We’re told quite a lot, which is somewhat frustrating when we’re trying to gauge character – a cut-for-time approach favoring narrative expediency over a potentially deep wellspring for his actors to draw from.
This doesn’t apply to Fiennes, who has a strange gift that applies to all of his work: he is one of cinema’s great “true believers.” He often embodies the ethos of the archetype he’s representing in his work – be it a concentration camp commandant, old money New Englander reduced to cheating on game shows, stately turn-of-the-century English butler, and so on – and makes them dramatically human. His work here expertly compliments Berger’s vibe, with Lawerence’s stoicism and undercurrents of doubts providing the film with its grace and its sense of dramatic irony once the final 10 minutes unfold.
He’s the idealized Church caught in its modern moment: Resisting the pull of spiritually-retarding fear of the globalized world while uncomfortably considering just how off-set modern progressivism is with his traditions. Ultimately, he is a sympathetic moral arbiter and a by-the-book theological detective, simultaneously afraid and resentful of his task as he is thoroughly committed to seeing it done right. It’s the kind of self-assured work that only an actor of Fiennes’ talents and experience can properly give, one that transforms the rigid nature of Conclave’s construction into an involving and, once those final moments roll around, surprising exploration of the oblique nature of celestial planning.