Conclave is, first and foremost, fun. Too long, yes, but fun. Nothing I’m about to write will make it sound fun. I’m about to bleed all the joy out of what is, despite the moments when it gives in to its loftier intentions, a trashy arthouse thriller. This is a B-movie shot by a prestige director. That’s not a compliment. We don’t get enough of those nowadays.
But I cannot help where my mind goes. Whenever I encounter a story involving high-level religious bureaucrats, I wonder to what extent they believe in the whole [gestures vaguely] thing. Are the rituals truly important to the people who participate in them? Do they do the rituals out of habit? I understand the power and importance of pageantry and public perception, the idea that rituals convey legitimacy over time, etc., etc., but the Cardinals at the center of Conclave are doing all this behind closed doors. When the Pope dies, the Cardinals could call a conclave, choose the new Pope via a round of Heads Up 7 Up, then hang out playing X-Box for three or four days. We would never know.
Conclave seems to ask similar questions. For the duration of its two hours, the pomposity of these men, the self-absorption of those who would be Pope, runs up against the mere materiality of their world. Early shots of the elaborate ribbon-and-wax seal tied around the door to the Papal residence are intercut with paramedicos zipping His Holiness into a body bag and clumsily loading him onto a stretcher. The title card, “Conclave” in yellow letters that take up the whole of the screen, is shown atop an overhead shot of that bodybag in the back of an ambulance, rocking side to side every few seconds with the motion of the vehicle. Director Edward Berger holds that shot for a while. This is not a movie that is concerned with the sacrosanct. At least, not in the sense that it wishes to distinguish between what is and isn’t.
There’s a world in which a movie about Catholics that emphasizes the material could be on the side of the Catholics—the material world holds us back from transcendance—but here it mocks. For all of the presentational severity, the stark lighting and intense close-ups, Conclave finds every possible opportunity for quiet, needling comedy. We are at all times kept aware that these are merely men vying for an office position.
Conclave doesn’t embrace comedy to the extent of, say, Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, nor does it have anywhere near as much to say about the nature of power, but it does have serious matters on its mind. Ideas about the nature of sin and doubt ooze out of the quieter corners of this movie. Its outlook is Humanist. Better to have sinned and learned than to have never been tempted, better to question the things you hold dear than to take them for granted.
I keep coming back to how firmly the movie is rooted in the material world. We see the immediate destruction of the Ring of the Fisherman, the ballots threaded together and burned, the cans that serve as the source of the legendary black/white smoke that concludes every vote, the liver spots that convey the age of most involved. Even the film’s final twist, an absurd attempt to give this delightfully glossy bit of eurotrash (non-derogatory) real heft, is rooted in the material.
Given my issues with Berger’s last film, All Quiet on the Western Front, I don’t find it surprising that the movie gets stuck on trying to make a statement. By the end, Conclave has become too consumed with making a point to remember that it used to be fun. Unless you are conveying something, well, transcendental, better to tell a good story that makes some good points on the way, I think, than to force it.