G iven, well ...
everything this week, you could be forgiven for never wanting to think about an election again. Which makes Conclave , a tense drama about the methodical, furtive, ruthless process of electing a new pope, sound like a tough sell for those reeling from the fact that over half the country voted for Donald Trump again . The film, starring Ralph Fiennes as the cardinal tasked with overseeing the sequestered voting bloc, embeds with the rarefied, insular elite of a storied and embattled institution – the Vatican – ostensibly concerned with the future of said institution.
And its subjects are, fittingly, highly fallible men prone to bouts of detrimental self-interest, particularly in the power struggle of choosing a new leader. And yet, this is movie I’ve been telling people to see this week, as a small act of buying time to think about anything other than our dismal national future, and as a portrait of how shifting circumstances can lead people’s decisions to places you would not initially predict. It’s not that the film, adapted by Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front) and Peter Straughan from the bestselling novel by Robert Harris, is escapist, per se.
This fictional conclave has stakes that map on to the real world, be it for the Catholic church or US politics – broadly, a struggle between returning to (generally whitewashed) tradition and forward-thinking acceptance, between intolerance and tolerance, all second to individuals’ barely c.
