‘Conclave’

Edward Berger​ ’s Conclave looks rather stately at first, a matter of grand buildings, Michelangelo murals and a simple question: the pope is dead; who will succeed him? But this impression doesn’t last long. Roman buildings start to whisper their histories, murals are spectacular but often threatening, and the question is not so much who as how. Robert Harris’s novel of the same name tells us that ‘conclave’ – the private assembly of cardinals to elect a new pope – means ‘with a key’, and the movie makes even more haste than the book to show us that the key is lost and so are several keys to the key. We are a long way from the comedy of Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope, even if we do have one in the end.

The plot soon begins to feel like it belongs more to a thriller than to a religious occasion. Visual short stories are woven into the action. We see a man in sharp focus in front of a hazy crowd; then the same man alone against a dark, empty background. We know what his name is, but who is he? We see a pattern of costumed prelates in a courtyard lined up as if for a dance; then a set of buses lined up to take 117 cardinals to the chapel where they will vote on the succession. Of the last image, Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes, says to himself that ‘it could have been the motorcade of a dictator.’

An early shot establishes three of the leading candidates in the coming election by closing in on their faces. They are Cardinals Bellini (Stanley Tucci), Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati) and Tremblay (John Lithgow), respectively American, Nigerian and Canadian. The other favourite, Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), an Italian cardinal who is less discreet and more stagey, has a scene to himself. He is the film’s conservative. He wants masses to be spoken in Latin and thinks that what he calls ‘relativism’ is the enemy of everything that matters. By contrast, it would seem progressive to choose Adeyemi, and at one point he is leading the vote. Yet he is just as conservative as Tedesco on many matters: according to the relatively moderate Bellini, Adeyemi thinks homosexuals should be in prison while alive and in hell when dead.

Gradually the late pope’s final actions begin to take over the story. Bellini tells Lawrence that the pope ‘had doubts’. ‘Doubts about God?’ Lawrence asks. No, Bellini says. ‘Not about God. Never about God. What he had lost his faith in was the Church.’ He may have lost a few other moral assets too, since we also learn that he conspired to discredit one of the likely candidates in the election that would take place after his death. He fired another potential successor in his last hours, too late for the dismissal to take effect. His faith in the Church may have suffered a recent blow by his learning that certain candidates in the election had bought the votes of a number of cardinals (this chapter in Harris’s book is called ‘Simony’). Even Lawrence, after an innocent-seeming conversation, wonders whether he has just been offered a job in a future regime for voting the right way.

The late pope did something else, which is essential to the film’s plot and meaning. Some time ago he promoted the archbishop of Kabul, a Mexican called Benítez, to the rank of cardinal, although nobody seems to have known about this until Benítez (Carlos Diehz) arrives at the Conclave. He is shy and modest but delivers a crucial speech after shrapnel from a bomb outside has fallen into the chapel, creating a lot of dust and fear, and provoking an impressively intolerant rant from Tedesco. He takes Islam as his target and says the Church needs to declare war on all religions other than its own. ‘How long will we persist in this weakness?’ The response from the others is a shocked but not unsympathetic silence (except for Bellini, who says Tedesco should be ashamed). And then Benítez stands up and quietly offers the opposing argument. Violence only creates more violence, and he has lived through it in Baghdad and Kabul. This response is more developed in the film than in the novel, as Berger and his screenwriter, Peter Straughan, have made its parallels with an earlier scene clearer. Becoming more emphatic, Benítez slips from English to Spanish. ‘What is it you think we are fighting?’ he asks. ‘The struggle is here. Within us.’ Or perhaps we don’t struggle enough. ‘We are small and mean men.’

The earlier scene is doubtful in all kinds of ways, even to its hero, Cardinal Lawrence. His job as dean requires that he give a preliminary address to the cardinals before the voting process starts. He has a printed homily in front of him, which he has been working on for several days. He begins to recite it, finds it full of platitudes and abandons his script, saying, ‘but you know all that.’ He talks about St Paul, reminds us that the Ephesians were a mixture of gentiles and Jews, and says that the sin he has ‘come to fear more than any other is certainty’. ‘Let us pray that the Lord will grant us a pope who doubts, and by his doubts continues to make the Catholic faith a living thing.’ He doesn’t seem to realise how liberal this line of thought is (he has never seen himself as anything other than a boring, middle-of-the-road minister). His colleagues are shocked and do not comment. Until later. ‘Your homily created quite a stir,’ one of them says. ‘I don’t think anyone expected you …’ At this point Lawrence interrupts and completes the sentence: ‘to say something interesting?’ On first viewing I thought Fiennes’s performance was a little too monotone, too wedded to a single idea of worry. On second viewing he seemed to portray monotony itself as erratic and constantly threatened by difference.

Benítez, by contrast, is the loner and outsider (even if he is a cardinal), which is why his embrace of Lawrence’s speech both extends and questions it. At a later moment he says, ‘I think of what it is to exist between the world’s certainties.’ Those certainties include doctrines, prejudices and practices. The film invites us to think, as we have seen, about attitudes to homosexuality and war – we are certain that we are allowed to kill our enemies – and shows us throughout that we are in a world of men. Women, including Sister Agnes, played by Isabella Rossellini, are there to do the cooking and make the beds. (Well, Sister Agnes gets to do a little more than that, thanks to some of the dead pope’s secretly radical plans.)

I’m not going to flatten the suspense by saying who wins the election, and a final conversation between Lawrence and Benítez – the solution to part of the thriller, let’s say – is best overheard in the film itself. But I do want to underline the significance of the converging opinions of the man who didn’t know what he thought until he said it and the man who had seen too much fighting not to be afraid of finality. There is also a sense in which the film delicately undoes its own parable, or invites us not to fall too much in love with it. Certainty isn’t always a sin and doubt isn’t always a solution. And ‘between’ might be a place to hide rather than a place to live.