Faith in Fiennes

Mid-budget genre-fare made for adults feels dead, but occasionally it still sprouts and geriatrics turn out. It’s not clear if studios think they won’t make money, or if they just hate them personally, like in the case of Warner Brothers under David Zaslav’s leadership intentionally botching the release of Juror #2 (2024) by dropping it in only a couple dozen theaters. If the theoretical crowd for that kind of affair is dwindling, they hadn’t all died off by the time I’d reached a matinee of Conclave (2024), an airport novel papal electoral thriller with an A-list cast sure to draw in the old timers (and myself): Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini.

When His Holiness passes, the Dean Lawrence (Fiennes) has to assemble the College of Cardinals for conclave, wherein they’ll vote-in a new pope. Even in the most divine of seats, there are backroom politics, and we’re quickly introduced to the main candidates. There’s Bellini (Tucci), the liberal who’d be a successor to the previous pope’s reform projects. Then there’s his direct opposition, the arch conservative, Italian nationalist, Roman supremacist Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), who wants to bring back the Latin mass and make-Catholicism-great-again (and also vapes). Tedesco has a reasonable foothold as the liberal vote remains united behind Bellini, as some of the votes go to Lawrence—although he insists he doesn’t want the papacy, and doesn’t even know if he has faith enough in the Church itself—some go to Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati)—an African cardinal who represents the Church’s expanded mission—and finally there’s the more moderate Tremblay (Lithgow), who doesn’t hold a firm political position, but doesn’t seem as dangerous as Tedesco. The politicking appears set, but then a wildcard falls into the picture, a cardinal none of them knew existed because his mission was kept a secret to protect his security: Benitez (Carlos Diehz), the Cardinal of Kabul, a quiet, reserved, and apparently benevolent man.

Slowly, everyone’s plans turn on their heads. Betrayals are set, rumors of impropriety, and other sultry sins mire the process of deciding the next pontifex maximus. It’s a well-built, technically proficient, piece of page-turning pulp for the screen. A breezy two hours; a movie that should be opening in theaters every other weekend to keep us entertained between mundanities, and instead studios insist on selling us flatly contrasted franchised limited series, or whatever gets dumped on the streamers for so many millions that they can’t possibly be anything more than tax write-offs.

One of the values of this kind of cinema is it works as a baseline for topical discussions. I wouldn’t say that Conclave has anything particularly useful to say, as the twists and turns primarily serve dramatic functions even though they try to pay lip service to what they could mean narratively. People are going to see an election movie right before an election, and there’s something to that. If you buy into a Kracauer school of thought (I do), there’s something to be gleaned psychologically by not just what a culture produces but what media attains popularity. For a mid-budget affair, making $15 million in its first two weekends domestically against a $20 million budget isn’t bad at all, and given that the crowd is largely older, Conclave is providing them a narrativization of something that concerns them. The petty squabbles and tug-o-wars between the simple center-left and the hard-right within the College of Cardinals could be applied as metaphor to any given Western country’s internal politics, but the parallel seems strongest towards the United States (and it must be no accident, too, that this Vatican-set, English-language film with primarily American stars dropped mid-October of a presidential election year).

What’s most interesting is the film’s perspective: that of the ambivalent, if liberal-minded Lawrence, who stands first as a staunch Bellini supporter but also fears for the institution of the Church itself. Through his eyes we see the rituals unravel, the decorum break away, the walls that keep them sequestered, and the seals that hold the Vatican together break apart. The institution is made of brick and stone, ceremonies and vestments, men and women, but he can’t grasp anymore that thing beyond the imminent that is supposed to guide them, that ideal. Something breaks through the walls near the end, and guides their hand—or perhaps it’s nothing, just the sound of birds. But it leads them forward, although they might not understand why or how. It might read as affirming to a broad audience, but I’m troubled, because I think there’s a truth to it, to how these institutions somehow keep surviving despite themselves. Cardinal Lawrence doesn’t know what to make of it, but he’s regained some faith in the invisible plan by the end. Me, I’m not so sure.