A Film Review of Conclave: An Epic Of Pope Proportions

And a good day to you, Mr. New Pope!

What will those Cardinals do next!

I just finished watching Conclave starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Sergio Castellitto, and Isabella Rossellini. That group of names helped me to understand that this was a movie's movie. Conclave is a story about a Pope passing away and leaving all of his Catholic Cardinals to sequester themselves and decide which of them has the right amount of Popeosity to be the new Pope.

This sounds like it could be very white and very boring, but this Conclave is neither. There are many shots of Ralph Feinnes's face as he deals with the pressure of his Catholic Deanship, but overall I thought Conclave had great pacing and a collection of facts that made a movie with similarly dressed characters fly by. There is also a fair bit of diversity… for Catholics at least. I remember a time when an African Cardinal was big news. It’s amazing how things have changed. Also, Francis Ford Coppola be damned, Conclave is like a more understandable Megalopolis. You get the rug pulled out occasionally, but you understand why everything is happening.

Other than priest action, what is Conclave about?

The Pope has passed and now a new one must be chosen by a group of sequestered Catholic Cardinals. I am not personally sure what a Cardinal does in the Catholic Church as I am not Catholic, but they are the big dogs in their areas. This 100% male group gets to spend time at the Vatican for days until they make up their minds. I know this doesn’t sound fun, but let me try to perk you up.

Ralph Fiennes, The Dean, has to get all the Catholic Cardinals together to decide which is the Popeliest. The main people up for the job are John Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, Lucian Msamati (playing Cardinal Adeyemi), Carlos Diehz (playing Cardinal Benitez), and Ralph Fiennes. Conclave is a little crazy. These “Pope-lites” each have a posse of supporters. If anyone wants to take on this Popetastic job, they have a few days to rally more supporters. With voting and elections going on in the U.S., it was good they got this out before November 5th, the riskiest election day in U.S. History.

In Conclave, Ralph Fiennes says that the ones who are desperate to become Pope the most are the ones you have to be careful of. Fiennes is very clear that he is in the midst of a crisis of faith and does not want to be Pope, but Sergio Castellitto does not care and keeps voting for him anyway. At the end of every voting period, people get in Ralph Fiennes's face about him being more ambitious than he looks. From there, it is a lot of voting, re-voting, knocking rivals out of the competition, Nun Isabella Rossellini watching you, and a litany of secrets. If you're like me and know nothing of what Catholic priests get up to, you'll at least learn a lot about how they choose a new Pope.

Should I see Conclave?

Yes? Well…

To non-Catholic Statesiders such as myself, Conclave is about a group of similarly dressed people struggling to solve a leadership problem in a world where almost everyone is dirty in a spiritual way. In this film, they do a great job bringing up things Catholics have allegedly gotten in trouble for, without having to call it out directly. Conclave is smart about how it may or may not call out the Catholic church for things that they are paying nearly a billion dollars over right this second. I think that makes this movie more fun. After all, I'm sure I could find a variety of documentaries on the actual Roman Catholic Church if I wanted a more factual account of what it is. This dramatization is perfect for me.

That's it. It's fun in the way Glass Onion is fun. You know someone is up to something. You just don't know who it is until the film is ready to tell you. Isabella Rossellini plays the most eyeballing nun since Maggie Smith in Sister Act. Those eyes tell you a lot, but they never tell you who's guilty and what they might be guilty of.

Watch out! She’s going for her ruler!

So with Conclave, if you want to see a story about a few guilty priests with a twist ending, this is your movie. No hot women or raunchy comedy to get in the way. Nuns surround these men and do all the work for them. We go from having a dead Holy Father to a group of sequestered Cardinals that make mistake after mistake after mistake. Regardless of how long the movie says it is, it certainly didn't feel that way. Conclave is focused. It takes it’s time to zoom in on faces to make its points. It does a great job of helping you understand how stressful the process of Pope selection is.

Once a Pope is chosen, that’s it. Catholics don’t have a system of checks and balances like North Americans are used to. Once the voting is over and a new Pope is chosen, that person becomes the dictator of the Catholic Church. He could clasp you in irons if he wanted. Another thing to remember is that there have only been two “Papal Renunciations” a.k.a. “Pope Retirements.” One was in 2013. The one before that was in 1415. That’s untold generations of Pope’s dying in office.

I am not a fan of using movie scores, but I would give Conclave a 7 out of 10. Keep in mind that I have only been to a Catholic church once and it was in New Orleans, Louisiana. I had no idea what the “kneelers” were and didn’t know why everyone was down and up so much. My church experiences were never like that before and everything looked so hard! So if you want to see how members of the holy community solve their Pope’n problems, check out Conclave.

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