Review: Conclave — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Conclave

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: PG

Run Time: 2 hours

Stars: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati, Isabella Rossellini

Writers: Peter Straughan, Robert Harris

Director: Edward Berger

Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival

No religious body in world history has engendered as many movies as the Roman Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals. (Disagree? Quick: Name all the thrillers set within the halls of the Southern Baptist Convention.)

A tense behind-closed-doors drama with career-best performances and a twist ending I guarantee you will never see coming (no matter how hard you try), Conclave manages to wring high voltage drama from an ancient ritual: the election of a new Roman Catholic Pope. The movies have been here countless times before — from The Shoes of the Fisherman to The Godfather Part III to The Young Pope — usually offering a familiar gaggle of outwardly pious cardinals jockeying for the inside track like Seabiscuit and War Admiral pounding down the final stretch.

Conclave is, at the outset, at least, cut from the same vestment: The pope has died unexpectedly, the cardinals are summoned to the Vatican, and the process to elect a replacement is placed under the authority of Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), a low-key Vatican bureaucrat who, incidentally, has some support for being the Next Big Guy. We meet the usual candidates/suspects: the obviously oily hypocrite (John Lithgow, natch), the pragmatic American (Stanley Tucci), the Italian mobster (Sergio Castellitto). All fit the usual parameters, except for an African cardinal (Lucian Msamati) who emerges as an unexpectedly sympathetic character despite his assertion that gay people “deserve prison in life and Hell in death.”

Flitting about all this testosterone-fueled locker room intrigue is a swarm of black-and-white-robed nuns. The women, barely acknowledged by the boys, dutifully keep their heads down — except for the mother superior (Isabella Rossellini), who utilizes her role as an invisible functionary to gather valuable intel and strategize ways to use it.

The beating heart of Conclave is its rock-solid performances, a collection of individual star turns that nevertheless adds up to an unforgettable ensemble piece.

Few screen actors can convey a character’s inner self like Fiennes, whose stoic Vatican cardinal convincingly morphs from pragmatic office functionary to budding idealist to Detective Columbo with little more than a subtly raised eyebrow. Lithgow roars through the carved Vatican doors with his expected ferocity, but he leaves room for the ambitious-to-a-fault power broker he plays to hide more than a few surprises up those loose black sleeves. Tucci’s American cleric exudes a sly mix of Yankee verbosity and reluctant restraint. And then there’s Rossellini as a seen-it-all sister who didn’t get the memo about women being silent in the church. Her steely-nerved Sister Agnes could easily be an older version of her mom’s Sister Mary Benedict, the baseball-playing boxing instructor sister who gave Father Bing Crosby a run for his collection money in The Bells of St. Mary’s.

The Vatican settings are opulent — particularly the film’s meticulous recreation of the Sistine Chapel, where the cardinals isolate themselves for their ballot process. And director Edward Berger — who left us all in awe with the subtle terrors of All Quiet on the Western Front — has a way of turning subdued, even silent passages into moments of screaming tension. Throw in an edge-of-your-seat score by Volker Bertelmann (Western Front, One Life) — and that what-in-the-world finale — and Conclave earns its pillar of white smoke.