Heaven help us! Conclave’s divine drama at times defies belief

CONCLAVE ★★★

(PG) 120 minutes

Storytellers of many genres have long known there’s something uniquely satisfying about a palace intrigue. The palace could be the White House or the local mental institution, it hardly matters. What does matter is keeping characters in close proximity while allowing them room to hatch their plots, then bringing them together at ceremonial occasions where they nod politely at one another while seething within.

Part of the fun of such intrigues is that while the participants take them deadly seriously, the potential for farce is ever-present – something always feels out of proportion, whether the stakes are absurdly low or absurdly high. That tinge of the ridiculous is the saving grace and the limitation of Edward Berger’s largely poker-faced Conclave, a plush entertainment adapted from Robert Harris’ 2016 bestseller about the election of a new Pope.

Berger is German-Austrian, but Harris and screenwriter Peter Straughan are Brits – and the film is an Anglo-American production, which has surely influenced its vision of how behind-the-scenes battles at the Vatican would likely play out. Ninety per cent of the dialogue is in English, explicitly identified as the characters’ preferred language rather than standing in for Italian or another language.

Ralph Fiennes suggests an especially tortured Oxford don in the lead role of Cardinal Lawrence, a level-headed British powerbroker assigned to ensure the election runs smoothly (the character was an Italian, Cardinal Lomeli, in the book). Other familiar Hollywood faces include Stanley Tucci as the progressive American contender for the top job, and John Lithgow playing a querulous Canadian centrist.

I can’t fault the skill of any of these actors, old pros at drama and comedy alike (watching them nattering away in their skullcaps, I could picture them reuniting for a Netflix caper about a team of high-end wedding planners turned spies). Still, the casting has a bearing on my main objection to Conclave, which is that I simply didn’t buy it.

On that note, a couple of disclaimers: I’m no authority on Catholicism, nor is literal plausibility what I’m mostly looking for in fiction. All the same, I had trouble accepting native English speakers would play such a central role in this particular power struggle, or that there would be significant support within the conclave for a reformist candidate from the US.

I also didn’t buy that even the most liberal of cardinals would preach a homily in praise of doubt, or describe certainty to his brothers in Christ as “the one sin I have come to fear more than any other”. Nor did I buy the story’s final twist – which, in fairness, is far-fetched enough that it may be meant to make us view the film in hindsight as a fable.

If so, it’s a fable aimed less at true believers than at humanists with a degree of nostalgia for faith, that probably describes many of the people who go to see arthouse films (Cardinal Lawrence, who struggles with prayer, is represented as belonging to this tribe at heart). Likewise, the moral isn’t just about Catholicism, but the more general idea that even a highly troubled institution can be set to rights if enough decent individuals remain on board.

That, too, I don’t entirely buy, though where the real world is concerned I wish I could. In the separate realm of fiction, my feeling is that a palace intrigue is dramatically most effective when the palace is rotting from the inside – and that Conclave in particular would have gained from a pinch more cynicism.

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