Edward Berger (2024)

A two-hour film about a competition has a head start.  You’ll likely want to know who ends up winning, regardless of the particular nature of the competition.  You’ll find out in half the time it takes to watch, for example, the Eurovision Song Contest nowadays.  This is one reason why Conclave easily holds an audience’s attention throughout.  Another reason is that, from quite an early stage, you start wondering how daft the storyline can get and the answer is, repeatedly, dafter than you thought possible.  This also makes for compulsive viewing, of a degraded kind.

The main men behind this account of a fictional papal conclave are Edward Berger, Peter Straughan and Robert Harris.  The first two have enjoyed considerable recent success – Berger as director (and co-writer) of All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), Straughan as scriptwriter for the TV adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels (2015 and 2024).  For all its technical accomplishment, Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front was strenuous viewing for largely the wrong reasons.  Despite its best-in-show production values and plenty of meticulous acting, Wolf Hall is, I think, a drag.  (It’s not just because you already know what happened to Henry VIII’s wives et al that dramatically surprising moments are thin on the ground – although that’s down to Peter Kosminsky’s direction at least as much as to Straughan’s writing).  The novelist Robert Harris, author of the source material for Berger’s new film, has been successful – commercially successful, that is – for much longer than the other two.  Conclave, published in 2016, was by no means Harris’s first zeitgeist-savvy bestseller.

When the incumbent pontiff (Bruno Novelli) dies suddenly, a conclave is convened by British cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), Dean of the College of Cardinals.  The perceived main contenders for the papacy are an American, a Canadian, a Nigerian and an Italian – Cardinals Bellini (Stanley Tucci), Tremblay (John Lithgow), Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) and Tedesco (Sergio Castellito), respectively.  Their theological and/or political positions are, broadly speaking, liberal (Bellini), middle-of-the-road (Tremblay), socially conservative (Adeyemi) and reactionary traditionalist (Tedesco).  Lawrence, himself a liberal, reveals early on to Bellini that he’s going through a crisis of faith:  he wanted out of the Curia but the late Pope was having none of it.  Other striking revelations come to light even before the conclave starts its sequestered proceedings in the Sistine Chapel.   Archbishop Woźniak (Jacek Koman), confidant of the late Pope, informs Lawrence that, on the eve of his death, the Pope demanded Tremblay’s resignation – which Tremblay denies.  Then someone not on the attendance list turns up.  Vincent Benitez (Carlos Diehz), a Mexican, claims to be a cardinal in Kabul, appointed in pectore.  Monsignor O’Malley (Brían F O’Byrne), the College of Cardinals’ ‘researcher’ and assistant to the Dean, gleans and reports to Lawrence that the late Pope and Benitez were close:  the Holy Father also paid for the Mexican’s recent travel to and from a Swiss clinic.  Benitez is admitted to the conclave.

The papal practice of appointment in pectore (‘within the chest’), which dates back centuries, has indeed been used most often to make someone a cardinal; the pope then keeps the appointment secret, or may keep it secret, to himself and the appointee.  Although in pectore appointments have actually become rare in modern times (as far as anyone knows!), they regularly crop up in modern papal fiction and movies deriving from it:  Conclave follows in the tradition of Morris West’s The Shoes of the Fisherman, Malachi Martin’s Vatican: a novel, Tom Grace’s The Secret Cardinal, and so on.  Once Cardinal Benitez makes his entrance, it’s a pretty safe bet that, despite his humble protestations that he’s not interested in the papacy, he’ll feature at the business end of proceedings.  Since it’s soon clear that Cardinal Lawrence will be the story’s protagonist, it’s very likely he’ll emerge as a frontrunner, too – even though, plagued with religious doubt, he considers himself a non-starter.  Lawrence’s heartfelt opening speech to the conclave – urging his fellow cardinals to resist certainty (as inimical to faith) and embrace doubt (as essential to it) – inadvertently puts him in the running.

The electorate numbers 108 cardinals; a candidate needs at least 72 votes (two thirds of the total) before white smoke will appear.  On the first vote, Adeyemi leads with Tremblay, Tedesco and Bellini all in close attendance; Lawrence, to his alarm, has five votes and Benitez one.   After two more votes, Adeyemi is edging close to the magic number and Edward Berger is on the point of starting his sensational process of elimination.  Berger has been cutting between formal sessions of the conclave, sotto voce conversations involving two or three characters in the shadows, and shots of the Vatican nuns at work – preparing and serving meals to the cardinals.  The nuns’ supervisor, Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini), also sometimes looks at a PC screen, which marks her out as different from the rest.  Late in the evening of the conclave’s first day, Lawrence hears raised voices outside his room and sees a nun isappearing down the corridor.  Next day at lunch, when the same nun, Sister Shanumi (Balkissa Maiga), drops a tray, Adeyemi shouts at her and storms out of the refectory.  Lawrence seeks an urgent interview with Shanumi; Sister Agnes tries in vain to prevent this; once she’s out of the way, the interview turns into a confession.  It seems that Berger is as bound as Lawrence by the Seal of the Confessional:  what Shanumi has to say is said off-camera.  In the face-to-face with Adeyemi that quickly follows, Lawrence doesn’t need to go into any detail before Adeyemi admits that he and Shanumi once had a love child together.  A man who was once a father in Lagos obviously can’t now be the Holy Father in Vatican City.

Adeyemi is notoriously homophobic so it’s amusing poetic justice that asserting his heterosexuality is the cause of his downfall.  But the Sister Shanumi plot strand and its impact on voting in the conclave is baffling.  According to Wikipedia’s synopsis, ‘a whisper campaign derails Adeyemi’s candidacy over the next few votes’ but there’s no evidence of ‘whispering’ on screen.  (In this film, if you’re not a major character you take a vow of silence.)  It then emerges that Cardinal Tremblay, aware that Adeyemi would be a serious future rival for the papacy, arranged for Shanumi to move from Nigeria to Rome – that’s why the old Pope, when he found out, tried to force Tremblay’s resignation.  It’s clear as mud how Tremblay knew about or where to find Shanumi.  Anyway, he now tries to brazen things out, claiming it was the late Pope who told him to recruit Adeyemi’s ex.  In desperation, Lawrence decides to break some different seals – in the papal apartment.  He discovers that Tremblay has been bribing fellow cardinals in exchange for their support in the conclave, whenever it may happen.  Lawrence makes a statement on Tremblay’s simony etc to the conclave; Sister Agnes chips in, to endorse what Lawrence has said.  With Adeyemi out of contention, Tremblay was all set to succeed as the compromise candidate.  Now he too is done for.

Just as Lawrence is casting his vote in the ballot that follows, a bomb explosion rocks the Sistine Chapel.  When he next appears, Lawrence has a couple of little scratches on his face; a discreet quantity of plaster dust sits tippet-like on the shoulders of his and other scarlet cassocks.  A suicide bomber has killed numerous people in the crowd of pilgrims gathering outside in anticipation of the announcement of a new pope.  With Bellini’s candidacy having bombed in a different way, Lawrence appears to be the moderates’ last hope of preventing Tedesco from becoming pontiff.  In an angry anti-Islamist tirade following the terrorist attack, Tedesco calls for the Church to take up arms in a new holy war.  Benitez, who has gradually increased his support in each successive vote so far, counters with a plea for peace.  He tells the conclave that he knows – from earlier postings in the Congo and Iraq, as well as from his time in Afghanistan – the true cost of war.  The Cardinal of Kabul receives enough votes to make the next ballot the last.  Habemus papam.

Not so fast, though.  Lawrence, relieved not to win, belatedly learns from O’Malley details of Benitez’s medical treatment in Switzerland:  a laparoscopic hysterectomy.  (I’m not making this up – though Robert Harris did.)   Cue Lawrence’s final confrontation with a now seemingly doomed candidate for the top job, except that Benitez isn’t doomed.  He explains that it was when he had his appendix removed a few years ago that he learned he had a uterus and ovaries:  in Switzerland, he decided at the last minute not to go through with the hysterectomy but, with the agreement of the late Pope, to carry on ‘as God made me’.  Meek, saintly Vincent Benitez becomes Pope Innocent XIV.  It couldn’t really happen:  John Mulderig’s piece on Conclave in Catholic Review points out that in pectore ‘promotions such as Benitez’s … are null and void if not publicly announced during the lifetime of the pope who made them’.  With due respect to Mulderig, whose balanced, gracefully witty review[1] is highly recommended, this movie’s infringement of canon law seems among the least of its sins.

Conclave is ridiculous not least in its self-importance.  Volker Bertelmann’s score contributes to that quality; so do the visuals.  This isn’t a case of natural light aka darkness for the interiors:  lamps are often on in rooms yet Stéphane Fontaine’s crepuscular cinematography renders the scene hard to make out.  Berger probably means this to indicate the twilight of the Church but I can’t have been the only member of the grey audience we were part of at Curzon Richmond to wonder if my cataracts were growing back.  Fontaine’s occasional overhead shots, in the Sistine Chapel (or the set designers’ ingenious recreation of it) and the square outside, are very striking:  a God’s-eye view of the conclave in session; an image of the cardinals walking in a rain shower under white umbrellas (they look like moving toadstools, with the white stalk and red top reversed).   But these bravura images aren’t in keeping with the main visual scheme.  They’re expressions, almost literally, of Conclave‘s high opinion of itself.  Although Peter Straughan, perhaps courtesy of Robert Harris in some instances, has come up with plenty of sententious dialogue, my favourite line was Monsignor O’Malley’s ‘I should have told you this morning but …’, which precedes his revelation to Lawrence about Benitez’s unexpected physical equipment.  This line is spoken only the once but ‘I should have told you before’ is really the film’s mantra.

Berger and Straughan are slippery about naming actual popes:  it depends whether or not the remark is innocuous.  For example, two characters, looking at a wardrobe of papal vestments, have a chuckle that these had to be adjusted to fit tubby Pope John (presumably John XXIII), whereas someone else refers to a pope who fought for Hitler, without mentioning Benedict XVI explicitly.  The script is carelessly facile about the theological and political direction of recent papacies.  Tedesco rails against a continuing drift towards liberalism and Bellini warns that Tedesco’s appointment will undo decades of liberalising progress – although John Paul II, whose pontificate lasted more than a quarter of a century (1978-2005), is widely considered a conservative figure.  The political divisions within the conclave prove to be remarkably shallow in any case:  it takes only a few make-love-not-war clichés from Benitez for consensus to reign.  (These should go down a storm with the jihadists with whom the new pope means to break bread.)  At the start of Conclave, Lawrence and others are wary of doing anything that might generate negative publicity – ‘You know what the press are like!’  By the end of the film, they’re not remotely worried that the new Pope’s intersex characteristics, evidently a matter of medical record, might somehow come to light.

Although some critics are praising Conclave as enjoyable pulp, it’s amazing how many others seem prepared to take it seriously – simply because the twaddle that issues from characters’ mouths is delivered by some high-class actors, and keeps ticking boxes.  The Catholic Church is mired in shameful secrets and cover-ups.  The Curia is as liable to shameless politicking as any secular set-up.  The papacy is the ultimate patriarchy.  And so on.  Ralph Fiennes acts with integrity – producing some especially impressive sobbing during Lawrence’s discoveries in the papal apartment – but he’s saddled with such an obvious man-of-conscience role that his portrait can’t develop much.  You can clearly make out in the prevailing half-light the deep lines on Lawrence’s troubled brow:  they announce from the word go who he is.  It’s nearly thirty years since Fiennes last had an Oscar nomination (for The English Patient (1996)).  This performance looks set to end the drought.  Fair enough, but if it does, it’ll seem all the more a pity that his more imaginative work in The Invisible Woman (2013), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and The Dig (2021) wasn’t similarly recognised.  Isabella Rossellini is on screen quite a few times before she utters a word.  You can therefore be sure that, when she does finally speak, her words will command attention.  Sister Agnes has opened her mouth before she joins with Lawrence in denouncing Tremblay’s dire wheeler-dealing but this is definitely her big moment.

With a strong screen presence but little to say, Rossellini embodies the subservience of the female characters in Conclave and prompts the question in the audience’s mind, ‘Isn’t it time to give women more of a voice in the Catholic Church?’  (Sister Shanumi, in an obviously more limited way, does something of the same.)  Viewers hoping for an excitingly enlightened decision in the papal conclave are going to be disappointed, then, that the film can’t eventually offer more than Benitez’s unorthodox genitalia.  When he tells Lawrence, ‘I am as God made me’, the words call to mind the moment in The Naked Civil Servant when a stern official trots out the injunction ‘Male and female created He them’ and Quentin Crisp comes back with, ‘Male and female created He me!’  Unlike Crisp, though, the new Pope Innocent won’t be proclaiming his difference from other men.  Those who know his secret will keep the information in pectore.  Or will they?  Robert Harris hasn’t written a Conclave follow-up yet but you never know.  If there’s a screen sequel, I hope it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a comedy.  In which case, Edward Berger will not be the person to direct Conclave II.

24 November 2024

[1] See https://catholicreview.org/movie-review-conclave/