You know that leftover bit you stumble across when you've just finished assembling a piece of flat pack furniture? Some little plastic doohickey that looks like it should be important, but which doesn't seem to play any vital role in the shelving unit you just put together. Conclave, director Edward Berger and writer Peter Straughan's adaptation of Robert Harris's 2016 novel, is the leftover doohickey of 2024 cinema. It looks like an important film, with its elegant visuals and impressive cast, but it doesn't seem to have any function. It's neither serious nor soapy. It's a Murder She Wrote episode without a murder. It's 12 Angry Men without the debates and arguments. It's a movie about Catholicism that plays like it was made by Presbyterians. I don't know why it exists. It's by no means the worst film of 2024, but it might be the most pointless.
What's frustrating is that the setup is one of the most intriguing of all the year's movies. When the Pope passes away following a heart attack, it's up to the College of Cardinals to elect his successor. Tasked with supervising the process while being an unwilling candidate himself is Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the Dean of the College. The frontrunner is Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), a homophobic Nigerian favoured by both the traditionalist and progressive wings of the Vatican, the latter of whom are willing to overlook his toxic views to install the first African Pope. Also in the race are liberal American Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), Canadian moderate Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow) and ultra-conservative Italian Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto). A late surprise entry comes in the form of Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), a Mexican who was secretly promoted by the late Pope.
Skullduggery ensues as it seems one of the candidates is willing to engage in backstabbing to ensure they get the top post. The narrative takes the approach of an Agatha Christie locked room mystery with the sequestered Vatican taking the place of some isolated mansion on a dark and stormy night. Rather than being killed off by an unknown assailant, the cardinals are forced to drop out of the race one by one for various reasons, including revelations of their murky pasts. Fiennes' Cardinal Lawrence is the Miss Marple/Hercule Poirot figure determined to get to the bottom of all this.
Unfortunately in practice Conclave is never as juicy as that premise teases. Straughan's overly verbose screenplay could be taught in screenwriting classes as an example of how not to write for a visual medium. Everything we learn about who these men are is delivered through dialogue, sometimes in on-the-nose speeches of the sub-Sorkin variety. Berger never uses his camera to tell the story, rather just to film his actors delivering their bland, exposition heavy dialogue. Those actors are admittedly very good, but there's a sense that they're all on autopilot, barely rising above a single note. Their characters tell us how they feel and what they believe, but we're never allowed to interrogate their faces to decipher the truth. We're told that Lawrence is suffering a crisis of faith, but we never see any evidence of this beyond Fiennes occasionally furrowing his brow so heavily you could plant turnips in the crevices of his forehead. There's no suspense because we're never given so much as a hint of who might be pulling the strings in this papal puppet show.
But perhaps Conclave's biggest flaw is how it's a movie set in the very engine room of the Catholic Church and yet displays little curiosity about either Catholicism or the Church. You can't help but wonder how much more engaging the film might have been had it been made by a Scorsese type with a lifelong fascination with the rituals of Catholicism. There are some well-composed images here, but they're cold and dispassionate; Berger might as well be filming a business convention in an airport hotel for all his disinterest in the visual backdrop of the Vatican.
This lack of passion in the storytelling jars with the soapiness of the plot. For all its sombre seriousness, Conclave is a very silly movie, and it's to its detriment that it refuses to accept that it's really just Dallas in the Vatican with JR (the traditionalists) battling Bobby (the liberals) over who gets to inherit Southfork. There's a subplot concerning terrorist attacks occurring outside in the streets of Rome that ultimately reveals itself as a contrived way of affording one of the candidates the opportunity to make a pivotal speech that shapes the election, which is decided with an about face so sudden it feels like the filmmakers were desperate to keep the film under two hours. A late twist is at once timely and a relic of a more sensationalist past, and as with the rest of the movie it's revealed through a speech. In its preference for words over images, Conclave might be the most Protestant movie ever to be set within the walls of the Vatican.
Directed by: Edward Berger
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini, Lucian Msamati, Brían F. O'Byrne, Carlos Diehz, Merab Ninidze, Thomas Loibl, Sergio Castellitto
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