“CARDINAL WARS: EPISODE IV — A NEW POPE”
THE POPE HAS DIED OFF-SCREEN!
CARDINAL THOMAS LAWRENCE has been summoned to
the Vatican to arrange a CONCLAVE of Cardinals to
elect a new Catholic leader.
Cardinal Lawrence does not know that the scheming
CARDINAL TREMBLAY held a mysterious meeting with
the Holy Father just hours before his death.
Cardinal Lawrence’s investigation could change
the fate of the CATHOLIC CHURCH, and ruin the progressive
CARDINAL BELLINI’s chance of rising to power.
Begun, these ATONE WARS have …
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, “Conclave.” It’s legitimately surprising how pulpy Edward Berger’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning “All Quiet On the Western Front” is. The movie takes place in the hallowed halls of the Vatican and tries to tackle (some of) the issues facing modern Catholicism, but when you get right down to it, this is airplane novel territory. It may look like an important motion picture, but it’s more like above-average John Grisham.
There is, it must be said, a certain joy in watching the austerity of the Catholic Church treated like a self-important whodunnit. Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is in charge of running the conclave to elect a new Pope, which should be a sacred affair but instead consists almost entirely of catty gossip and petty schemes. You could change the papacy to the prom queen and you’d have mostly the same movie — although there’d probably be a lot less Latin.
Fiennes is phenomenal, which are words we get to write often, and he’s navigating tricky waters. Cardinal Lawrence is having a crisis of faith and a crisis of career, and would very much like to be out of Vatican City altogether. Instead he has to take point on the most important decision possible, and his attempts to stay the heck out of it make him, ironically, a serious candidate. After all, nobody who wants power should ever be allowed to have it.
That doesn’t stop the other likely contenders. Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci) says he wants no part of the papacy but he’s actively pursuing it anyhow, because the other serious candidates are conservative hardliners like the regressive Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto, “Mafia Inc”) and the suspiciously suspicious Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow). Then again there’s also the dark horse Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), whose entire existence was a mystery until the start of the conclave, for reasons that will be made clear later.
Everyone’s got secrets. Cardinal Lawrence does his best to reveal them all, and he wrestles with the responsibility: Should he air everybody’s dirty laundry or stay in his place and hope that God sorts it out? One of the nuns, Sister Agnes, is played by Isabella Rossellini, so you know she’ll have something important to do eventually. In a film with showy roles for iconic character actors like Tucci and Lithgow, it’s Rossellini who subtly steals the whole thing. She commands the screen even though she spends most of the film on the periphery, silently observing with enough force to knock over a building.
When “Conclave” focuses on locked room mysteries and insidious conspiracies, it’s a corker. Berger’s self-serious approach to the material only highlights just how melodramatic it is, pleasing the crowd while tricking us into thinking there may be more to this. The characters may think that there’s a lot on the line, but “Conclave” is defiantly disinterested in tackling many of the vital issues currently facing the church. Sex crimes barely warrant a mention, and while the church’s views on homosexuality and abortion are certainly on the line, we never find out exactly how progressive Cardinal Bellini’s policies would even be. So for all we know, he wouldn’t be that progressive at all.
“Conclave” works a little better as an allegory for modern secular politics — when one Cardinal suddenly supports his opponent, Lawrence snidely asks if they offered him “Secretary of State” — but it falls back on spirituality, in a particularly heavy-handed fashion. Which is admittedly on-script for a story about Catholicism, a religion that isn’t exactly known for its subtle, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moralizing.
The conclusion of “Conclave” — I’ll never tell, but as the film draws nearer to the credits, its resolution seems increasingly foregone — injects a new idea into the mix. But that idea is cloyingly unexplored. Worse yet, a stray line of dialogue undermines what “Conclave” seems to think its own point was. A vow of silence prevents me from going into detail before it comes out, but let’s just say think-pieces are probably going to be written. The last-minute fumble doesn’t quite ruin the movie, but it does make what could have been a sublime conclusion into a (hopefully nuanced) conversation we’re all going to have to have about how this movie slightly whiffed it.
Berger’s adaptation of “All Quiet on the Western Front” was a memorable production, but its oppressive storyline and physical and psychological violence made it hard — if not impossible — to enjoy it on any conventional level. “Conclave” is an old-fashioned potboiler, rivetingly executed and packed with memorable, exciting performances. It’s genuinely fun, even if the characters don’t have any of it.
Whenever the filmmaker’s emphasis is on the sinful humanity of these men of God, reducing them to Machiavellian backstabbers, it’s a satisfying and absorbing yarn. When it tries to say something profound — while refusing to acknowledge the many elephants who populate the Vatican’s many rooms — it makes cardinal errors.
