Conclave (2024) directed by Edward Berger, starring Ralph Fiennes. Photo: Access Entertainment - FilmNatio / Collection ChristopheL via AFP
Despite my lack of a personal relationship to Catholicism, I do love a good Pope film, and I've been very lucky in recent years to have had plenty of good ones to enjoy.
In 2019 we had Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins in The Two Popes, a fictionalised story of the handover between Benedict XVI and Pope Francis and - I think - Anthony McCarten's best screenplay.
The most fun fictional Pope has to be Jude Law in Paolo Sorrentino's 2016 series The Young Pope in which a handsome and charismatic New York cardinal is elected as a compromise candidate but then proceeds to challenge every Vatican assumption and threaten the heart of the establishment. He ended that series in a mysterious coma, replaced by the glorious John Malkovich. Seek it out, if you can. It's delicious.
But the Pope film that came to mind while I was watching Edward Berger's Conclave, was Habemus Papam, or We Have a Pope from 2011.
In Nanni Moretti's sly comedy, Michel Piccoli plays another compromise candidate, a cardinal who doesn't want the job and tries to deal with his panic with the help of a psychoanalyst.
In Conclave, the best men for the job profess to not wanting it and the ones who want it are deeply compromised.
The ageing Pope has passed away and it is the job of Cardinal Lawrence, the Dean, to organise the conclave of cardinals who will elect his successor.
Lawrence (played with grace by Ralph Fiennes) is himself trapped. Before his untimely passing, the Pope had persuaded him not to resign his post, despite a crisis of faith in the church and an unwillingness to continue to serve.
As the 118 cardinals gather from around the world, we get to see the various factions, the geographic and linguistic schisms, the public and private ambition - and that the previous Pope may still be manipulating things from the grave.
As secret ballot after secret ballot occurs, with jockeying and lobbying in the corridors and at the dinner tables, we see that this conclave is a battle between the progressive future and the conservative past of the church. There's a lot at stake.
In keeping with the themes of ambition and humility, Cardinal Lawrence repeatedly professes his unwillingness to be considered for the highest office but keeps receiving votes regardless.
He also claims to be as sequestered from the outside world as everyone else, but clearly has a foot in and a foot out, thanks to his assistant Ray (Brian O'Byrne) who brings him news and information between votes. Lawrence also protests that he is not a detective, and it is not his job to find dirt on any of the candidates, but that is the position he finds himself in.
Conclave is based on a bestselling novel by Robert Harris, best known I think for his alternative history of World War II, Fatherland, and Peter Straughan's Golden Globe winning script hews pretty closely to the bones of the book.
It's always a mug's game trying to decipher the contributions of the screenwriter and the director from a finished film, but between Straughan and All Quiet on the Western Front's Berger, we have ended up with a terrifically well-crafted thriller.
Berger's eye for a composition matches Straughan's gift for foreshadowing, a second watch really opens Conclave up in pleasing ways.
It is beautifully paced and acted with precision - especially by Fiennes but also by Stanley Tucci, Sergio Castellito and the vital Isabella Rossellini.
I was perhaps expecting something with a bit more theological meat to it, but this is a political thriller not a religious one. When characters talk about a crisis of faith, it is faith in the machine of the church that they are talking about, not God.
The conclave is supposed to sequester the cardinals from the real world, to bring them closer to God and his will (whatever that is) but the world and its needs keep on intervening, suggesting - perhaps - that by locking themselves away, these wise men lose focus on the people they are there to serve.
Conclave is rated M is playing in select cinemas all over New Zealand from the 9th of January.
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