"I Accuse You Of Wanting To Be Pope": Conclave Makes Sure You Know You're At The Movies

no spoilers I swear

It’s possible that you are looking for a few hours of distraction over the next day or two; allow me to suggest a good old-fashioned trip to the movies to see Conclave, if you can. It’s a thriller about the election of the next Pope starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tuccy, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini.

There’s also a fellow named Sergio Castellito who plays the most villainous cardinal. He looks a bit like an Italian Fred Melamed and he’s just wonderful. I saw it last night and I loved it so much I wanted to wake up the baby when I came home, just to tell him about it. Of course I didn’t because he’s only seven months old and doesn’t even know who Fred Melamed is yet. Also he seems to be sleeping a lot worse than he used to a few months ago. Have any of you had a seven-month old who seemed to sleep more fitfully than they did at five months? What did you do about it, if so? I’m very tired.

I could not help myself from whispering fiercely, on occasion, “Conclave!” in the theater whenever something especially exciting happened, and something exciting happened often.¹ It’s a wonderful Process Movie, if you like that sort of thing. A lot of Process can’t rescue an otherwise bad film, but it can catapult a good film into greatness; you don’t only watch All The President’s Men for the serious phone etiquette and the typewriter handling, but my gosh, it certainly helps. And when it comes to process, the Vatican is second to nobody. They’ve got ballots on heavy stationery that they impale on red thread, huge wooden abacuses, a giant tray of what looks like woolen dryer balls for tallying votes, a little Aga stove for sending up papal smoke — the works.

And for the solemn sound of rustling fabric — brother, if you’re looking for a movie this year full of the wonderful swashing sound of thick robes being carried along swiftly down a heavily-carpeted hall, then have I got a movie for you — look and listen no further than Conclave. I’m not very good at describing music, but the scoring sounds like if a grandfather clock were being very slowly and methodically taken apart by someone both technically competent and cruel. Conclave!

There is of course too the prospect of seeing Ralph Fiennes’ enormous face looking conflicted and earnest for several hours, which is as good a thing as I can possibly imagine. Conclave is soap that also wants to be prestigious, which makes sense because Ralph Fiennes sort of wants to quit his job and sort of wants to be Pope at the same time. Everybody in this movie either wants to be Pope with every atom in their body, or they sort of want to be Pope and wish they didn’t. The best part of the movie — and there are no bad parts — comes around the one-hour mark, when everyone in the running to become Pope starts accusing one another of wanting to be Pope, which of course you’re not supposed to admit if you want to be Pope.

Tucci is very good — it’s wonderful to see him in something that isn’t completely mascotized and sanded-off, much as I enjoyed his turn as everybody’s favorite uncle in the 2000/2010s — and there’s a scene where he and Fiennes apologize to one another that I found trasncendently beautiful. If you have two old friends gently apologizing to one another in your movie, I will love it with the deranged loyalty of a recently-domesticated feral cat. Lithgow is splendid in the way he always is; he offers no surprises but I don’t think he needs to. Rossellini is terrific but she has a fairly small part, so don’t go in expecting to see acres of her.

I love religion, and I love domestic details, and I love movies about lively group dynamics, so this was tailor-made for me; I appreciate that Conclave is interested in virtue and values faith (although in the usual Hollywood faith-for-faith’s-sake way, where the holiest thing a person can do is doubt their faith all the time, which isn’t bad exactly but is well-worn territory at this point). I’m at a point in my life where I am only willing to experience religion second- or third-hand, I will not or cannot experience it directly, so watching a very good actor pretend to be a devout but flawed cardinal is about the closest I’m able to get to experiencing the divine. I’m both optimistic about and allergic to religion: I wish there was more of it, so much more of it that it flooded the market entirely and lost most of its influence, but I also want it to stay at least 500 feet away from me for the rest of my life. Conclave is a pretty good substitute for going to church, I think, because it’s as high-flying as it is trashy, which is to say it tries to emcompass as much of a certain kind of human experience as it possibly can in two hours.

And it’s wonderful to look at a lot of old faces. There was hardly a young face to be seen on the screen for two hours. It was glorious, splendid even. Faces and hairlines and teeth that had not been enhanced for the screen — liver spots and ragged cuticles — lines and impressions and furrows and folds — marvelous old faces, cragged and slack, angry and sad and resigned and deeply loving — faces that would make you weep to look at them. It’s been five years this month since I have seen or spoken to any of my relatives, and in that time my world has grown all too contemporary. I don’t know as many older people as I used to, and I miss it. Conclave is neither the religion of my childhood nor any of my grandparents, but it is what you would get if you made an airport thriller out of both of them, and that’s very much worth looking at for a few hours. I do hope you’ll go see it, and that if you have a grandmother, you’ll call her today for me.

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1. The theater was nearly empty and I whispered it very quietly, I assure you. The triumph in my voice was fierce, but the volume was respectful.