Conclave: Certainty Is a Sin

Recommendation: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Radical Imagination: 💡💡💡

Artistry: 🎨🎨🎨

Drain Factor: 🩸

The pope has died, and the dean of the college of cardinals, Dean Thomas Lawrence, must lead a conclave to pick a new pope. The cardinals are assembled,  and doubting Thomas, who is having a personal crisis of faith, gives a homily about how certainty is a sin. Gossip, intrigue, and rule-breaking follow, as self-interest competes with humility and a search for the truth.

There are some fabulous artistic choices in this film. Kudos to the location scout who found those saturated yellow walls and the casting scout who found all those interesting faces. I’d go to an art exhibit of the portraits they capture near the beginning of the film. Those moments of stillness in blocking and breaking the fourth wall are going to stick with me.

The sound mixing in this film is also beautiful and meaningful - the sound of breathing is foregrounded throughout the film as are the chirps of a caged bird when nuns are present. These two sonic motifs have a spectacular payoff in the third act of this film.

Also, as someone who has taken students to the Vatican , I was astounded by the verisimilitude of the set. Though you would expect a film with the Sistine Chapel as a central set to feature Michelangelo’s famous ceiling, it’s actually his later fresco Last Judgement that gets the most attention here. Michelangelo painted the ceiling when he was a young man at the height of the Renaissance, and that work exhibits the confidence and optimism of both that time in history and in Michelangelo’s life. The Last Judgement, by contrast, was painted during the reformation when the Catholic Church was under attack and when Michelangelo was old and wary, and it is heavily reflective of the petty internecine Vatican politics at the time, making it a perfect contemplative object for Lawrence throughout the film; he gazes upon it every time he casts a vote.

Does this movie have something interesting to say, and can it sustain us and point us to a better future?

Sure. Without spoiling anything, I will say that I think this movie is Oscar bait partially because it thinks it is brave, but its politics are 5-10 years behind the curve. It’s definitely getting nominated.

That being said, I was ready for some serious antics from the nuns, and I was disappointed. I think Isabella Rossellini is great but criminally underutilized.

This movie is pretty enjoyable and won’t take too much out of you; that being said, it is about a tense election, so parts of it feel so on the nose it can be exhausting. Political resonances aside, Conclave is generally fun, well-paced, and interesting. Now that you can rent it on streaming, it’s the perfect crowd-pleaser to watch with your family at the holidays, though uber-conservative family members may find reasons to complain about parts of it.

What It’s Really About

Spoiler Section: Analyzed Using My (ID)ology Decoder Ring

Conclave is a fictional movie about an election  wherein one candidate - the man in room 45 - actually gets disqualified for a sex scandal. Another gets disqualified because he is corrupt and has committed financial crimes. Yet another gets disqualified because he espouses racist and xenophobic politics and wants to make the church great again. In this fictional universe, a person with a uterus  can only get elected if he is a man. Can you imagine?

Obviously, this movie engages with this historical moment in time by resonating with contemporary discussions about xenophobia, the “Me Too” movement, and a growing mainstream awareness of non-binary and intersex individuals.

I love a movie where there’s a thesis statement speech, and this movie has two of them.

At the beginning of the conclave, Dean Lawrence gives a homily in which he says that  certainty is the great enemy of unity, and that god’s gift to the church is variety and diversity. In the third act, Cardinal Benitez says that having seen war, the enemy is not external but internal, cautioning the other Cardinals, and us, against our own hate and ambitions. This view is sanctioned by the film in his eventual ascension to pope.

Ultimately, this is a film about striving to see things as clearly as possible while leaving room for doubt and mystery. Glass is important in this movie; we focus on the glasses on the bedside table of the dead pope (literally how the character is credited) a couple of times over the course of the film; at the end of the film Cardinal Trembely’s glasses are cracked. The glass near the top of the of the Sistine Chapel shatters due to a car bomb, which is the event that precipitates the speech that leads to the election of the eventual pope. This shattering of ceiling-adjacent glass breaks the cis-male stranglehold in church leadership. Ah, fiction.