Beyond the finale, there is little that could not have been foreseen about Conclave if one had thought about it in advance. This is a movie where, to borrow from a friend, no stereo is left untyped.
I’m not Catholic, or even religious, so I have no dog in this fight. But I am a sucker for high Roman pomp and ceremony, and a good costume drama filmed in the heart of the Vatican was always going to see me shelling out $29.95 to buy it on Apple.
I wish I had rented it and saved a fiver.
Conclave is indeed visually sumptuous, and Ralph Fiennes is nearly always worth watching – although his blubbering in his role as the saintly liberal Cardinal Lawrence after losing faith in the Church at a key point in the movie was not his finest work. Stanley Tucci, as Cardinal Bellini, tells him to get real.
The accidental redeeming feature of Conclave is that without wishing or intending to do so, the movie helps explain the triumph of Donald Trump. To understand this, a few more spoilers are necessary. In most respects however, the movie serves simply as yet more evidence that Hollywood has completely lost its way.
As is well known, the movie tracks the process and people involved in electing a new Pope after the sudden death of the incumbent. The saintly liberal Cardinal Lawrence, played by Fiennes, presides over the election process as Dean of the College of Cardinals. Part political convention, part medieval history lesson and part spectacular history of Vatican artworks, the Conclave locks a hundred or so Cardinals inside the walls of papal Rome conducting serial secret ballots until they elect a new Pope. Watching the factions at work, whispering in corridors, plotting, conniving, was like watching Canberra at its worst.
And Lawrence is up to the task. Among his other attributes he does a fine Hercule Poirot, sans moustache, breaking into the dead pontiff’s bedroom and finding, secreted in a concealed bedhead, evidence that exposes one leading contender, Cardinal Tremblay, as having paid a few fellow cardinals in advance for their vote.
It turns out said Tremblay is no ordinary baddie but has political dirt-file skills Richard Nixon might have admired, having arranged for one of his chief opponents, the black arch conservative Cardinal Adeyemi, to be exposed, mid-Conclave, as a predator upon young girls.
The politics are equally predictable. Tucci, now mostly famous for his at-home-with-Stanley Italian cooking Instagrams, is aptly named after an Italian aperitif. It was as if Tucci had slipped out of his kitchen to don a scarlet biretta and cape to play himself. Hip woke guy plays hip woke Cardinal Bellini. Had he ventured into the dark unknown, and played a conservative cardinal, that may have been worth watching.
The progressives, led by Lawrence and Bellini, think Chris Pyne and Simon Birmingham, caucus regularly to try to block their conservative nemesis, Cardinal Tedesco. Tedesco is flamboyantly villainous, all bushy eyebrows, wild hair, and extravagant stage whispers. It’s no surprise he thinks the Church has gone to the dogs ever since it abandoned the Latin Mass. The only surprise is that the director didn’t clothe him in a black hat and cape and play melodramatic organ music when he enters any scene.
Cardinal Adeyemi is even more horrendously conservative with views on homosexuality quite common among his African colleagues but he’s seen as very non-PC among First World cardinals.
Despite his conservatism, Adeyemi is the leading candidate in early rounds of voting, accepted even by the liberal Cardinals.
On their intersectionality graph, it’s OK to oppress gays if you’re black.
But there are limits: his race comes to a crashing end when his sexual misconduct is exposed. Membership of an oppressed race apparently is not enough to excuse sexual predation.
The conservatives start to shift their votes to the Tridentine Mass-loving Tedesco. And he looked like being the next Pope until a sudden shock of violence prepares us for the denouement. The assembled Cardinals are showered with fragments as the windows of the Sistine Chapel are blown out by a bomb planted as part of Europe-wide plot by Islamist terrorists. Or is it God raining down on this radiance of egos?
As the Cardinals recover, enlightenment dawns. Sun streams in through the shattered stained-glass windows and lights up Michelangelo’s famous fresco The Creation of Adam. We await God’s basso profondo voting instruction to the Cardinals, but this is mercifully a stereotype too far even for today’s Hollywood.
Instead, they opted for another predictable plot point. The explosion uncovers the Islam-hating conservative within the Conclave.
And Tedesco doesn’t disappoint. He uses the Islamic threat to call for religious war, apparently believing this will be a vote winner. Through the middle of the voting pack comes the person of the hour: Cardinal Benitez, a Mexican whose appointment to the College of Cardinals had to be kept secret because he served in dangerous places, ending up in Afghanistan. The Archbishop of Kabul appeals to the Cardinals’ better angels and calms the call for religious war. Despite mutters about his unknown “health condition”, they immediately recognise godliness among them and elect him Pope.
The straw is just being shovelled into the incinerator to produce the famous white smoke heralding a successful election when the final denouement is revealed. The new Pope is intersex – and is duly named Innocentius to signify a pureness of heart.
Where does one start? Every art form has its limitations and film is no different. Restrictions of time and plot mean that even the best films can’t fully develop every nuance of every character. Some level of simplification – even over-simplification – is inevitable.
However, where today’s movies fall back on myth and stereotype is usually revealing. Conclave makes no effort to engage with conservative thinking. Hollywood is today so immersed in liberal shibboleths that it is unable to characterise those views it disagrees with in a nuanced or sophisticated way. It is simply unable to present conservatives except as papier-mache models devoid of substance. Like Tedesco, all conservatives are cardboard cut-outs of evil. They serve no purpose except as hate figures for progressives.
When you understand this, you can make sense of why the US elected Donald Trump. Even if you approve of much of Trump’s creative destruction – though the results are not yet in – any rational person must admit big chunks of it are risky and some of it apparently just dumb. Even dyed-in-the-wool conservatives often long for the more predictable and traditional conservatism of Reagan and Bush #1. How then did the US end up with Trump?
At least a partial answer is to be found in the rapidly increasing radicalisation of US progressives, as evidenced in its intellectual and artistic leaders – like Hollywood. Sensible centre-left Democrats like Bill Clinton (“it’s the economy, stupid”) were sidelined by people increasingly unable to engage with conservative thought. Hillary Clinton’s legendary “deplorables” comment not only probably won the 2016 election for Trump but illustrated what the Democrats actually thought of those who didn’t agree with them. As the Democrats pushed left, the Republicans pushed right. Trump is radical in many ways but is no more than an equal and opposite antidote to what was on offer from the other side of politics.
Hollywood could be the canary in the coal mine. When Hollywood gets tired of stereotypes where left = good and right = bad, we may have a sign the paradigm has shifted. That could be when the Democrats repossess the White House.
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Spoiler alert. If you don’t want to know the twist at the end of the recent movie Conclave, stop reading. To be honest, it’s not much of a surprise – it was one of a couple of hackneyed endings that liberal Hollywood was always going to choose for a movie about the Catholic Church. But I did need to warn you.