I was nine years old when I witnessed my first papal election. And by “witnessed,” I mean watched for news of it every evening during dinner on the thirteen inch black and white TV my parents brought down from their bedroom. Normally the rule was “No TV during meals,” but this was an understandable exception in our Catholic house. And it was an exception repeated just a month later after the newly elected Pope John Paul passed away suddenly in his sleep.
I say this as prelude to the observation that Conclave, director Edward Berger’s new film adapting Robert Harris’s best selling novel, gets much of the details about this fairly secretive process correct – the sequestration of the College of Cardinals, the small contingent of nuns who attend to their needs and many of the details of the election process itself. So from this standpoint, the film creates an authentic setting in which this story plays out.
After the unexpected death of a well-regarded pope, Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is placed in charge of organizing and running the conclave which will elect the papal successor. Among the Cardinals converging on Vatican City for the gathering include progressive Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci) and the staunchly conservative Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) and the somewhat middle-of-the-road Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), both of whom become front-runners in the initial rounds of balloting. But things become complicated when Cardinal Lawrence discovers that the previous pontiff had information about some of the potential candidates that could scandalize the outside world were it to become public.
The four male leads, as well as Isabella Rossellini as the head of the order of nuns who attend to the Cardinals during the Conclave, deliver performances that show that they are at the top of their individual games. The film remembers that while it is about an institution of God, it run by men, with all their weaknesses and vices as well as their strengths and virtues. Fiennes’s Cardinal Lawrence is a man in a spiritual crisis before having the responsibility of managing the Conclave thrust upon him. Fiennes underplays this inner conflict, vocalizing it in his dialogue with his pitch and pauses. Tucci’s progressive cardinal wants the Church to move forward, but doesn’t want the appearance that he is campaigning for the Papal throne while Castellitto’s Tedesco is very open about wanting to roll back several of the advances that the Church has made in the last several decades, probably all the way back to returning the Mass to Latin. Rossellini’s Sister Agnes faces her own conflict when she becomes embroiled in the mystery around what the previous Pope knew about certain Cardinals.
For the most part, the film avoids sliding into Dan Brown/religious conspiracy thriller-like territory. The dueling liberal and more conservative or tradionalist factions within the College of Cardinals is drawn from similar fractions within the current Church. And the issues of concern that could possibly taint the papacy of the potential candidates are issues that have been relevant to the Church as an institution. All of this feels very real and is handled in a non-exploitative way.
However, Conclave stumbles in its third act when not one but two different events throw the story off onto a new direction. Either one could have built the film to a satisfying, if different from each other, climax. Taken together, though, it is just feels like overkill and disrupts the verisimilitude that director Berger had worked so hard to create.
