What explains the enduring popularity of movies about the pope, and particularly about becoming the pope? To be sure, papal election has built-in ritual drama, right down to the moment when all eyes in St. Peter’s Square turn skyward to await the puff of white smoke from the Sistine Chapel chimney, signifying “Habemus papam.” But its human drama resides in the tension between spirituality and ambition that undergirds the process, and in the unruly scrimmage of very earthly powers that pushes it forward. A papal conclave is the Vatican’s version of legislative sausage-making. Best not to look inside.
In Edward Berger’s breathless adaptation of the 2016 Robert Harris novel, the beleaguered man in charge of sausage production is Fr. Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), dean of the Vatican’s College of Cardinals. Mired in what he obliquely calls spiritual “difficulties,” Cardinal Lawrence has been hoping to resign his post and leave Rome. Not so fast! Following the sudden death of the pope, Lawrence must take charge of the effort to replace him. Conclave’s opening scenes portray the solemn rituals that precede this effort: the seal hammered off the late pope’s ring; the papal apartment and office cordoned off with red ribbon and a wax seal, like some Vatican version of a police procedural.
As the curial convocation nears, our reluctant dean winces to anticipate how much rumor-mongering and machination it will bring. “Hell arrives tomorrow,” he muses darkly to the Vatican secretary of state Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), “when the cardinals come in.” And sure enough, here they come, arriving en masse and in black, with black umbrellas unfurled, resembling nothing so much as a flock of raptors, or perhaps assassins.
Soon, the corridors and courtyards of Casa Santa Maria, the prelates’ lodging, hum with political intrigues surrounding succession, intrigues that take shape around a theological divide between liberal and conservative cardinals. For Lawrence, Bellini, and the other liberals, the two leading candidates among the papabili are worse and worser: either the like-minded but toxically ambitious Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), or the vehemently conservative Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), who militates on behalf of the Tridentine Latin Mass while blaming all world problems on a half-century of liberalizing gutlessness in the Church, gleefully quoting Yeats on how “things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” Conclave leaves no doubt that Tedesco is the “Make the Vatican Great Again” candidate. “If he becomes Pope,” Bellini warns, “he will undo sixty years of work!” When Lawrence gently scolds his friend—“This is not a war, Aldo”—Bellini doubles down. “It is a war, and you have to commit to a side!”
War or no war, the conclave certainly has a take-no-prisoners vibe. When a compromise candidate emerges, Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), he is quickly beset by swirling allegations. Did he father an illegitimate child decades ago with a young nun—and is that now-middle-aged nun’s presence at the conclave the result of perfidious moves by Cardinal Tremblay to derail Adeyemi’s candidacy? As for Tremblay, was he called to the deathbed of the dying pope and dismissed from his cardinalship for “gross misconduct,” as a Polish prelate tearfully confesses to Lawrence—or is that a scurrilous lie designed to topple him? And is a newly arrived Archbishop of Kabul, who bears a secret in pectore writ of appointment from the dying pope, possibly an impostor? “You look anxious,” a concerned colleague remarks to Cardinal Lawrence. With the raging soap opera he has on his hands, you can see why.
Attempting to calm the waters before the balloting begins, Lawrence in his opening homily urges his confreres to “be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ,” and more specifically to put aside their overbearing theological certitudes. “Certainty is the great enemy of unity and the deadly enemy of tolerance,” he intones, as the ranks of cardinals listen, stone-faced. “Let us pray that God gives us a pope who doubts.” Thus is the liberal glove tossed into the curial ring.
As the rounds of voting proceed, and one candidate after another falls away, speculation arises: Will Lawrence himself be the one to emerge as the new pope, rather in the manner of the 1978 election of John Paul II, which required eight ballots? When Lawrence earnestly disavows all such ambition, Bellini, both friend and potential competitor, expresses doubt. “Search your heart,” he says, “and tell me it isn’t so.” Perhaps it is so, and at any rate it seems that Lawrence—unwilling or not—may be the last liberal left standing. Some are born to be pope, some achieve popehood, and some have popehood thrust upon them.
By the sixth ballot, Lawrence wants only for the pain to end. “Please, no more investigations,” he pleads when his assistant and de facto oppo researcher offers to dig deeper into Cardinal Tremblay’s possible malfeasance. “I have heard enough secrets. Let God’s will be done.” And yet there are more secrets in store. Reluctantly following the whiff of impropriety, Lawrence breaks that seal we saw placed on the papal chambers at the movie’s outset, tiptoes in, and uncovers definitive evidence of corruption. We know that God works in mysterious ways. But documents stashed in a secret compartment of the papal headboard?
If it all sounds a bit overheated, well, that’s by design. Promotional copy for Conclave includes summaries like this: “Once the Catholic Church’s most powerful leaders have gathered and are locked together in the Vatican halls, Cardinal Lawrence uncovers a trail of deep secrets left in the dead Pope’s wake, secrets that could shake the foundations of the Church.” Foundation-shaking secrets are the foundational meme of pope-themed movies. Take the revelations hinted at in last year’s The Pope’s Exorcist, which follows Russell Crowe—the Vatican’s chief exorcist—“as he investigates a young boy’s terrifying possession and ends up uncovering a centuries-old conspiracy the Vatican has desperately tried to keep hidden.” We won’t even mention what unholy shenanigans the Vatican tried to keep hidden in The Da Vinci Code.
Conclave author Robert Harris is not exactly known for subtlety. His oeuvre includes Fatherland, a counterfactual historical novel in which the Nazis win; Archangel, which reveals that Stalin fathered a secret son as his heir and successor; and Pompeii, whose farrago of Roman bribery, corruption, and murder ends only when Vesuvius erupts, obliterating everyone. Leave it to a writer like that to turn the selection of a pope into a potboiler. And indeed, formally, Conclave resembles nothing so much as an espionage thriller, right from the opening, floor-level shot of brogans marching down a marble hallway, a leather briefcase bobbing alongside, set to darkly urgent music. Is this a spy exchange, or perhaps an illicit delivery of highly confidential documents? No, it’s just Cardinal Lawrence, on his way to work. Volker Bertelmann’s relentless score assails us with ominous percussion and the plangent strumming of violins and cellos. At times, the disjunction between the routine goings-on and the doomful music creates unintentional comedy.
It is tantalizing to imagine how this movie might have fared in different hands than Berger’s. The German director won a 2023 Best Picture Oscar nomination for All Quiet on the Western Front. Despite its substantial power, that film was conventional through and through, hewing closely to the rules of a genre defined by films from Gallipoli and Platoon to Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down. For Berger and his screenwriter, Peter Straughan, faithfulness to genre in the current movie means adhering to the page-turning, plot-twisting spirit of Harris’s bestseller.
The result is that Conclave, as a drama, operates well below the level of its own significant aesthetic achievement, which can be credited to the superb collaboration of master designer Suzie Davies and cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine. Davies’s sets (including a meticulous dummy of the Sistine Chapel, with a computer-generated replica of Michelangelo’s ceiling) possess an impressive visual gravity; the stand-in location for Casa Santa Maria, where the cardinals are housed, boasts not only marble floors but also marble walls, as if the prelates are bunking in a mausoleum.
Fontaine’s slow, deliberate camera gives these somber settings their due. So, too, does the magnificent performance turned in by Ralph Fiennes. Was it perhaps informed by Fiennes’s relationship with his late uncle, Nicholas Lash, a laicized priest, liberal Cambridge theologian, and devotee of Karl Rahner? Whatever the inspiration, Fiennes has always been skilled at conveying a bleak intensity, and his Cardinal Lawrence wears the grim visage of a man long resigned to quietly suffering his way through thankless churchly tasks. Conclave would have been a better film if it had steered away from action and followed that suffering look on Lawrence’s face, exploring a spiritual crisis that parallels the ecclesial one.
Instead, Berger’s film careens toward a climax both sensational and sentimental. I won’t spoil its ending except to complain that Conclave spoils itself, beginning with a sudden explosion that blows a hole through the roof of the Sistine Chapel (for a moment I thought we had reverted to Pompeii, but no, it is an act of political terror). This is followed in short order by theological explosions among the prelates, with Cardinal Tedesco at last revealing his true reactionary villainy, vowing holy war against Muslims and bellowing that “we need a leader who fights these animals!”
It would be an understatement to say that Conclave paints theological differences in the Church with a broad brush. More like a spray gun. And if that weren’t enough, the script follows Harris’s novel in serving up a preposterous outcome to the papal balloting, by way of a late-innings, dark-horse candidate whose victory indulges a progressive fantasy so mawkish and far-fetched that it would make even the New York Times editorial board blush. “I am what God made me,” the earnest electee informs Cardinal Lawrence privately, after a final, shocking disclosure. “Perhaps it is my difference that will make me useful.”
Yes, God works in mysterious ways, but Hollywood screenwriters? Not so much. Conclave wears its liberal heart on its priestly robe, and leaves the Vatican with yet another deep secret to keep.
