Turning the pope’s election into a trans referendum
Hidden within the fake pomp and banal compositions of Conclave is a litany of left-wing nostrums, spoken by fictitious characters during the election of a new pope. Ralph Fiennes plays Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, a British clergyman who is the dean of the College of Cardinals at the Vatican. He must conduct the unicameral voting while dealing with his own crisis of conscience — reflecting the modish religious skepticism that inspires director Edward Berger and screenwriter Peter Straughan in their adaptation of the Robert Harris novel. No sentient viewer should be shocked by the twist ending that confirms the wildest, weirdest progressive sexual fantasy.
Conclave’s dramatic mechanism inquires into the quasi-democratic secrecies of government, much like the closed-door sessions of the U.S. Congress. (One frustrated cardinal complains, “I feel as if I’m at some American political convention.”)
In the absence of political filmmaking that you can take seriously (or that can be trusted to be impartial), Conclave won Britain’s BAFTA Award for Best Film and has been enthusiastically received by the U.S. Academy Awards, validating our current disbelief in governing institutions (the film was also included in Obama’s latest culture decree for its appeal to his own chicanery).
But instead of examining the breakdown of parliamentary procedure (an analogy to the ongoing corrupted judicial processes of lawfare), the film falls back on standard left-wing alarms. (The angriest cardinal frets, “I’d be the Richard Nixon of popes.”) Conclave reduces philosophical and spiritual issues to the cheapest and most banal melodrama. (Volker Bertelmann’s cornball suspense music evokes the trite, blasphemous thrillers The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons.)
Director Berger picks up where those potboilers left off. If this passes for “classical filmmaking” in a film culture that has abandoned aesthetics along with reason, it doesn’t convince me. Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here was measured and politically subtle, but Conclave crosses the Rubicon of credibility, and Berger’s staging of the climactic confrontation between conservative and liberal candidates is laughably flat-footed. None of the simplistic characterizations — Fiennes’s soft-eyed piety (his voice throbbing with Gielgud delicacy to convey dedication to judiciousness), Stanley Tucci’s hammy anger to show righteous progressivism, John Lithgow’s display of arrogant villainy — prepare for the absurd climax that caters to the sentimental agenda of most Focus Features releases since Brokeback Mountain.
The dead pope “had his own doubts toward the end,” we learn. “Never about God. What he had lost faith in was the church.” But this gimcrack airport-novel intrigue includes a deus ex machina cardinal, Vincent Benitez (Carlos Diehz), conveniently created in pectore — in secret — from Afghanistan but of Mexican heritage (but why not Ukrainian?). The giveaway begins with conservative Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto, so great in Marco Bellocchio’s My Mother’s Smile but strident here, away from Bellocchio’s complex virtuoso ambivalence). And there’s no ethical or hermeneutic debate in Straughan’s script, although Fiennes’s Cardinal Thomas Lawrence is named after Thomas More (A Man for All Seasons) yet displays none of screenwriter Robert Bolt’s sophistication — that impressive gift for aphorism tempered by the discipline to stick to the rigor of credible, dramatic speech.
Berger’s Vatican caper lacks the tact and sensitivity in François Ozon’s superb By the Grace of God, even quickly dispensing the repentance of a disgraced African cardinal (Lucian Msamati).
Next, Cardinal Lawrence pinpoints “this moment of great uncertainty in the history of the church.” Then, a later speech declares that “diversity is the strength of the church,” and another mentions institutional guilt owing to “genocidal sexual violence during the First World War.” Pushing all Millennial buttons.
Conclave condenses its irreligious view when a cynical cardinal wishes that “God grant us a pope who doubts.” Benitez, the film’s Bergolio-style peasant-cardinal, justifies reform, declaring, “The church is not tradition. The Church is not the past. The Church is what we do next.” That lecture is too close to Bergolio’s sanctimony, which is awfully close to Vladimir Lenin’s “What Is to Be Done?”
This only passes for thoughtfulness because film culture has abandoned its former Christian deference apparent in films from The Bells of St. Mary’s to The Shoes of the Fisherman, which were made when Hollywood still respected the church. Even The Nun’s Story, an agnostic’s film but one of Fred Zinnemann’s finest, was respectful. Modern agnosticism is contained in Cardinal Lawrence’s epigram “Our faith is a living thing because it walks hand in hand with doubt.”
Conclave reflects Europe’s lost monarchy and the global lack of political faith. As if extolling radical agnosticism, the film concludes by discussing the role of women in the church and an intersex cardinal’s laparoscopic hysterectomy before finally tossing its bad faith to a hermaphrodite pope. When film culture beds down with godlessness, the ludicrous result is Conclave.