Stand Up for Better Oscar Bait!

On Edward Berger's 'Conclave'

Edward Berger, Conclave, 2024

The Oscars awards ceremony is a perfect opportunity for TMR to be grumpy about one of the year’s leading films. Co-founder Sam Kahn writes on Conclave. If you enjoy what TMR is producing, please consider pledging $50 a year or $5 a month.

-The Editors

The mother of all costume dramas.

Conclave starts with a simple, can’t-miss premise. We will stick ourselves in the Vatican for two hours. What we have to spend on the elaborate set will be offset for by never having to change locations. We will be surrounded by absolutely fabulous art, by marble columns reaching up high over the top of the frame, by the sea of cardinal red.

If we don’t have much in the way of sex or violence, the dopamine receptors in our brain will be lit up by cardinals, and here the film’s producers are really onto something. Archbishops don’t do it, even popes somehow don’t quite do it, but imagine being poolside in Hollywood and picturing this project: an entire College of Cardinals, gathering for a cardinal conclave, all in cardinal red, with round red cardinal hats and red cardinal suits and sometimes special cardinal mitres, all going about their cardinal controversies, and then, as the last drunken archbishop totters away with the Swiss Guards closing the gates behind him, the cardinals are sequestered, so that (except for the kitchen staff, who keep annoyingly intruding into the narrative in order to provide some gender balance) they are only ever interacting with other cardinals, getting onto special buses in which the only other passengers are cardinals, staying in special cardinal hotels that look well like it might be the set of John Wick but now booked-out entirely for cardinals, and if it happens to rain at any point in the film then the entire conclave will be issued with special white cardinal umbrellas that, needless to say, when glimpsed from a balcony shot, color-coordinate perfectly with the red cardinal outfits as they sashay slowly forward to the accompaniment of string instruments. Picture all that and then imagine that the cardinals, sequestered and in their cardinal red, also have British accents, and you have a picture pretty much as soon as you can hop out of the pool and dry off.

Once you have that, it’s a straight shot to Mike’s on Sunset Boulevard to get your tux fitted for the Oscars, and I guess there’s nothing wrong with any of this — my limbic brain is as easily seduced by cardinal gatherings as anybody else’s — but we have to have principles somewhere in life, and this, I guess, is one of mine: that we, the people, deserve better Oscar bait than this. Fundamentally, in terms of overarching artistic vision, the film is Ralph Fiennes running out of sonorous men he can portray and settling on — why not? — a cardinal. And where the energy goes to sets and costumes and atmosphere, what is stinted on is actual plot line: it’s basically a mystery, or thriller, but where the principal investigator doesn’t actually investigate — secrets just fall into his hands. One claimant to the papacy is dismissed when a member of the kitchen staff — a non-cardinal — conveniently drops a tray, allowing Lawrence, the Ralph Fiennes character, to unravel a mystery within minutes. Another claimant is dismissed when Lawrence slips into the pope’s quarters and finds all the key financial records he needs tucked thoughtfully away by the late pope in the minutes before his death in the exact spot where Lawrence will find them but, curiously, no one else.

So it’s not much of a plot (in terms of storytelling structure, the “rising tension” can probably best be charted through the pairing of the ever-greater-trembliness of Ralph Fiennes’ voice and the deepening unease of the string instruments), but it is trying to say something — and what it’s trying to say is a reasonably-relevant political commentary, about the decline of the liberal order, with what John Rawls or Curtis Yarvin would call “the cathedral” (with the cathedral here totally literalized) collapsing of its own rot and facing the wolves at the gates. In this case, the schema is that the pope has been a good liberal but slightly lost his way as he faded into incoherence at the end of his life. His heir apparent would seem to be Bellini, the Stanley Tucci character, who stands, as he puts it, “for a common sense approach” including tolerance for homosexuality and greater gender equity but is essentially a caretaker figure and lacks the charisma either to earn popular support or to fight for it. (We are supposed to picture figures like Olaf Scholz or Michel Temer.) The logic of liberalism would seem to lead to Adeyemi, the Nigerian cardinal with the wind at his back, but we run here into insuperable cultural differences —both Adeyemi’s views on homosexuality and his bout of youthful non-abstinence scupper his candidacy with the fundamentally-uptight Europeans. His withdrawal from the election is one of the film’s very few genuinely moving moments. That leaves the hopelessly-corrupt Tremblay, of whom the resigned Bellini remarks, “We’ve had worse.” The exhaustion at the core of the liberal project would seem to open the door for Tedesco, the xenophobic conservative, who at least has energy behind him as well as a certain wolfish charm. The advent of Tedesco forces a real reckoning for the liberal establishment, and the core of the film is Lawrence — the embodiment of the professional managerial class (“some are chosen to be shepherds and some are chosen to manage the farm,” the pope has told him in a prophetic moment) — setting aside a lifetime of circumspection and finding the courage to vote for himself. The fact that Lawerence’s moment of courage is a fake-out — one of many emotional disappointments in the film — shouldn’t distract too much from what it is really trying to say. But, instead, the film fades back into a classically 2010s liberal fantasy —the intersex unifier delivers the perfect homily at the right moment in the debate and is catapulted from the very outskirts of the society into its dead center, thereby saving the church and, very probably, the world (and also sparing the professional managerial class from really stating its values or getting its hands dirty).

It’s a little hard to know, in the thick of the 21st century, what this sudden mania for papal dramas is really about, but the simplest explanation would be that they are a stand-in for thinking through the nature of institutions. In 2016, with The Young Pope (which almost perfectly coincided with Trump’s electoral victory), the conservatives had their turn — with all the pleasures of not giving a fuck while in fabulous costumes. Now, it’s the moment of the liberals. The conservatives have gone back to being garish Le Pen-types frothing away about immigrants while smoking a vape. In the scorecard between them, the liberals are a lot less fun than the conservatives (The Young Pope was also a much better show than Conclave is a movie even if, all things considered, it could have used a few more cardinals). Conclave has a very heavy-is-the-head vibe and it seems unable to resist sanctimony or we-are-all-stronger-through-our-differences-moralizing, but to give it its due it does wrestle with the urgent question. The cathedral is collapsing, the center is not holding. The question is whether the institutions can find within themselves the strength to survive.

Sam Kahn writes the Substack

Castalia

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