Conclave (2024)

QFS No. 164 - The invitation for February 5, 2025
It’s that time again – time to cram in a bunch of Academy Award nominees! Personally, I’m going to attempt to watch all of the Best Picture nominees before the broadcast on March 1st.

This selection was made by throwing a dart a dartboard, metaphorically. I haven’t seen a majority of this year’s Best Picture nominees so might as well start somewhere. Is Conclave the most interesting of the bunch? Who knows!

So join us in watching our first film from 2024 and discuss below!

Conclave (2024) Directed by Edward Berger

Reactions and Analyses:
For a (literal) closed-room thriller, one moment in Conclave (2024) stands out as an outlier and punctures the closed box in which much of the movie is contained. The Dean of the College of Cardinals and man in charge of the vote for the new Pope, Lawrence (Ralph Finnes), finally follows his heart and casts a vote not for himself but for Benitez (Carlos Diehz) to become the leader of the Catholic faith. The moment Lawrence delivers his vote, an explosion rocks St. Peter’s Cathedral and light finally enters the building. The scene stands out in part because it’s incredibly dramatic – the most action in the entire film – but also because it conveys a message.

A blast from the unrest outside punctures through insular sanctity of the papal conclave in Conclave (2024).

And that message from Conclave seems clear: spiritual faith does not happen in a box. Modern religion requires the leaders of that faith to be out in the world. The real world is out there and it will invade and burst through, so you might as well deal with it directly. It’s not an accident that turtles appear in the film, a creature that can put its head in its shell and insulate itself from the world.

Benitez’s stated mission is decidedly the opposite. We discover that his life as a priest has been in the trenches as a secret archbishop in Kabul and other hotspots around the world. He toiled with the people and gives a speech that states his personal thesis, which is also the film’s thesis:

No, my brother. The thing you’re fighting is here… inside each and every one of us, if we give in to hate now, if we speak of “sides” instead of speaking for every man and woman. Forgive me, but these last few days we have shown ourselves to be small petty men. We have seemed concerned only with ourselves, with Rome, with these elections, with power. But things are not the Church. The Church is not tradition. The Church is not the past. The Church is what we do next.

Benitez (Carlos Diehz) preaches to the other cardinals: “The Church is not the past. The Church is what we do next.”

Conclave on its surface is about religion – and, yes, it is of course because it takes place in the highest realm of the Catholic church. But in essence, the film is about politics. Without squinting all that much, you can see the film is speaking to our time, right now, in this world. Petty men and power, feckless liberals trying to hold off a radical conservative takeover, someone who wants to make the church great again, when meanwhile the world is burning outside. Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), the Italian cardinal, decries the liberal march the church has taken over the last 60 years. If the clergy were all still speaking Latin – which they were before the Vatican II reforms from 1962-65 – everyone would be united instead of going off to seek their own countrymen or language groups, as they do in the Vatican cafeteria, he points out. And also, for good measure, in the next breath he exposes his personal racism and bigotry by stating to Lawrence that he couldn’t possibly imagine the disgrace of having a brown or black Pope (though, one would argue, people in populations with mostly brown and black people are often the strongest Catholic countries so that is indeed the face of the faith…).

Bickering and fighting is at the heart of the conclave in a film that’s as much about politics as it is about faith.

But even the middle-of-the-road cardinals can’t get their act together, unable to find a leader to satisfy all tastes. The moderate, Tremblay (John Lithgow) is proven corrupt, having bought votes which is a grave sin for a priest in the Catholic tradition. Ultimately, it’s Benitez, an outsider with a pure heart who convinces them that he’s the true voice of the people, in part by saying he doesn’t want to become Pope or the trappings of power. If anything, Conclave is a story about dysfunctional political systems.

It’s also a story the distance between lived faith and institutional faith. With few exceptions, there is very little discussion about religious doctrine. And the men, for the most part, don’t appear to be running to be the next Pope for any honorable or noble reasons, but a need for power or to prevent someone else from obtaining it. Lawrence himself states repeatedly and openly that he does not want to be Pope and very nearly left the clergy. But his homily in which he extolls the virtue of doubt just before the conclave begins inspires several cardinals to vote for him instead of Bellini (Stanley Tucci), which throws the plan of the liberal faction into disarray. As someone in our QFS group put it, these are not gods or special people, just ordinary people put in positions of power.

Lawrence’s moving speech about the dangers of certainty and the power of doubt, for that is wellspring of faith, inspires some cardinals to cast their votes for him.

And what ordinary people do can sometimes be messy, which is in part why this film is so thrilling. Edward Berger, who directed the excellent All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) is an exacting filmmaker. His percussive score helps drive the suspense, but Berger’s visual framing that enhance the film. The compositions are stately and tightly composed, very little camera movement except when absolutely necessary. The rigidity of the framing reflects the rigidity of the Vatican, one of the world’s great seats of power. And with it, the lighting at times evokes the great Renaissance masters including Caravaggio. There’s lovely synergy between the visual references this film suggests and knowing that the Roman Catholic church was perhaps the greatest sponsor of art in Europe and likely throughout the world.

Stately grandeur, captured and framed thusly.

The lighting in several scenes evoked Renaissance paintings, religious in nature, often commissioned by the Roman Catholic churched.

Bellini (Stanley Tucci) calls this war, not a conclave.

For all of the pomp and global interest in selecting a new Pope, the film feels small and therefore thrilling. Lawrence breaks into the deceased Pope’s quarters, breaking a wax seal, to investigate Tremblay’s possible malfeasance. The scene had me on the edge of my seat and really all the scene consists of is one man breaking a rule in order to weed out a larger problem. But even here, Bellini breates Lawrence and commands him not to reveal Tremblay’s problems because they need to vote for him, because this is war – and the conservative Tedesco will win if Tremblay is eliminated. Lawrence takes a principled stand and, with the help of Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini), prints out the documents for all the cardinals to see. And here again, the film is not about religion but about politics. About doing what is perhaps expedient but morally questionable versus doing what is noble and right but perhaps could lead to bad consequences.

Benitez ascends, breaking ground in more ways than one.

In the end, it’s Benitez, the outsider who earns the most votes and becomes the new Pope. And the twist is he is neither man nor woman – someone who is as God made them. He’s the first Pope (as far as we know) to have female reproductive organs. Is this the way the Catholic church will finally have female clergy? And here is another statement by the filmmakers, and arguably this is the one that contains the most spirituality. Perhaps the best person to lead the faith is someone pure of heart, who knows true suffering and what humanity needs in organized religion. That faith is in the world – someone who is neither man nor woman, not from the old world but something new. That the church has to live, as he says in the film, in the future.