Some thoughts on Conclave...

or, how not to choose a pope

Since my chances of becoming a cardinal are about the same as me playing full forward for Geelong - that sainted team of men! - I was keen to see this fictionalised account how the chosen few - currently 139 cardinals - come to elect a new pope.

Disappointed, I was not: Conclave is an enjoyable romp through pontifical politics, with a touch of spice for effect - and a sober reminder that whatever else it is, the Catholic church is a fellowship of Men, with a capital M. It’s hardly alone in that - most other religions are similarly masculine in their hierarchies - but it’s a central and implacable fact of this movie. You need a set of testicles to get into the Sistine Chapel for this gig; whether you’ll still have them after the process is over is another question. It’s a rough contest. There have been plenty of cries from the faithful that this depiction of a fictional contest is fanciful - which kinda misses the point. Conclave is about more than white smoke.

Much of the surface stuff is observation of process and procedure. We see how the cardinals eat, sleep and vote; how they are dressed by teams of support staff, seemingly unable to do it themselves; how teams of nuns cook and clean and fuss over them, with Isabella Rossellini in a small but rich role as the mother superior. All of this has a delicious sense of voyeurism, like peeking behind the curtain at a richly-coloured fancy dress party for old men.

More significantly, we get a version of how the cardinals might behave when the doors and windows are locked and they have to elect the leader of what is still one of the most powerful institutions on earth - ‘the holy Roman and Apostolic Church’, as we used to say when I attended mass as a practising Catholic and believer. I am neither now. I left the church 50 years ago, and my sense of its shortcomings has only increased in the meantime. If my view of the movie is from the outside, it is also the view of someone born inside who continues to have friends within, both nuns and priests. I have great respect for the work some do at a practical level.

For me, almost none of the technical business of the movie needed an explanation, but that might not be true for those brought up outside the church. If you don’t know what the Curia is or that there are still those who want to bring back the Latin mass, you might watch Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci pacing around in red and purple robes and think, what century is this?

As Dean Lawrence, it falls to Fiennes to conduct the Conclave after the Holy Father has expired in his rooms in the Vatican. Lawrence is a man in crisis: his faith has deserted him, especially when he tries to pray. The HF has told him, dispiritingly, that there are two types of priests - shepherds and managers - and he is not a shepherd. That’s the pope’s way of saying you need not apply for the top job. Nor does Lawrence want it… or does he? One of the key words of the film is ‘certainty’: Lawrence tells his fellow cardinals that uncertainty is a good thing in a pope. Too much certainty leads to abuses, he tells them. So we are left guessing whether he really does or doesn’t want the ring. Fiennes is nothing if not an expert at portraying both sincere doubt and buried ambition. His performance is as tortured as you would expect.

The openings scenes clang with doors and windows closing: it’s an aggressive soundscape, calculated to put us on edge. The rooms in this part of the Vatican are dimly lit, the cardinals moving like bright red ghosts along marbled corridors. All the cracks quietly gather for the fray, in scenes that are pictorial but also tinged with visual humour, and a sense of spectacle. Once they are sequestered, the movie stays locked in, as they prepare to do battle. The fight is both spiritual and temporal: as one of them says, the only proper choice for pope is someone who doesn’t want the job.

The front-runners are clear: the cadaverous Tremblay (John Lithgow), presumably a Canadian, whose ambition knows no bounds; the machiavellian arch-conservative Tedesco (Sergio Castellito), who wants the papacy returned to Italy. It is ours, like the World Cup, he thinks. His American rival Bellini (Tucci), liberal to the core, is determined to block Tedesco and the dignified African, Adeyemi, who wants to jail all homosexuals. No-one asks the obvious question of whether he would start in the Vatican.

The film is directed by Edward Berger, a German, whose work on All Quiet on the Western Front was impressive. His work here is no less startling: it’s a tightly controlled drama, with an intense effect on our senses, and utterly absorbing from the first frame. The script, by Peter Straughan, is a textbook example of how to adapt a novel - that being by the English writer Robert Harris (Fatherland), and published in 2016.

The less said about plot the better. There is a superb twist near the end that I didn’t see coming: it concentrates the meaning and resonance with great effect. It starts out as a film about Ralph Fiennes’ crisis of faith, with a strong premise: could a man who has lost his faith become pope? It ends with a much wider conception, to do with the church’s attitudes to women - perhaps the biggest challenge that Rome is now facing. Just a few months ago, Pope Francis reaffirmed the Church’s opposition to the ordination of women. The drawbridges have been raised, the battlements manned (pun intended). If women are to invade this citadel, they will get a fight from these old men in funny hats. The Catholic Church was not built in a day; nor will it change in this century if these old men can see to it.

Predictably, Catholics online have complained about blasphemy and insult, and reiterated the claim that there is a conspiracy by Hollywood to ‘get’ the church. That’s a not-very subtle form of anti-semitism, based on the largely wrong idea that Jews still control Hollywood and that ‘they’ all think as one big Catholic-hating organism. Yes, there are plenty of Jews in the movie business; there are also quite a few Catholics, Moslems and quite probably, a few Rastafarians. The movie industry is not a single-cell organism; it’s an unruly thing, responding to stuff that’s in the air - and the church’s affairs are always in the air. It’s fair enough to see exaggeration in the film’s machinations and manouvering around the vote, but that’s to miss the wider point. The film asks questions that many of the flock - and quite a lot of clergy - are also asking: when is the Catholic Church going to enter the modern world and embrace real reform? When is it going to recognise that the sexual scandals that have all-but wrecked the church in some countries (Ireland in particular) are not an aberration but the result of the church’s own structure; and when will it finally understand that women must enter the Citadel if the church is to survive?

I expect many will disagree, both with me and the movie. Go ahead - but see the film first, before you bring dem guns.

Postscript: My friend and ex-Herald colleague Paola Totaro - a seasoned source of good reporting on Italy and many other things - wrote an excellent and detailed piece in The Australian on January 19 that pointed out a few things I should have mentioned: cardinals over the age of 80 are not allowed to vote, and the reigning pope has a large influence over who gets to vote. Fascinating to see what the machiavellian Cardinal Pell was up to in the days before he went before the heavenly judge. Read her excellent piece on her pages on facebook if you can’t get beyond the paywall.