That’s So Conclave

Photo: Focus Features

A friend recently regaled a group chat with an otherwise innocuous story about going to get a few documents in a manilla envelope photocopied for work. “You were Conclave,” someone else replied. Three months ago, replying “you were conclave” would have been nonsense: This is not a word anyone and their friends are using in modern parlance, unless you just so happen to be friends with a cardinal who is in charge of voting for the new pope. But something new and crazy is happening. Cardinal Lawrence is People’s Sexiest Man Alive (or at the very least, he should oversee the process). The cardinals attend the Wicked premiere. Conclave is Mean Girls. Everyone is “Conclave pilled.”

To log on to X recently has been to experience whiplash between election-related disdain and a new Conclave meme about those nosy cardinals and all their dirt. On paper, there should be nothing inherently meme-able about Conclave, but it has perhaps proven itself so rife for memes because in some ways, it’s the feel-good movie of this year’s awards season. What, you think people are gonna do riffs on Blitz?

Edward Berger’s follow-up film to his very loud and very serious All Quiet on the Western Front tells the story of a papal conclave gone awry — a group of cardinals gathering to select a new pope while also advocating for their own agendas in a film that more closely resembles a political thriller than it does, say, the trippy decadence of The Young Pope. Conclave is a dry, largely jokeless film, with gags (when they appear) limited to that of visual queues. It’s funny to see a cardinal vaping, no? Overseeing this mess of whisper-mongering and self-selection is Ralph Fiennes’s Cardinal Lawrence. Fiennes is an indelible performer who can recite Shakespeare or play Voldemort or show up as an insane guy with crazy swag (e.g., Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker), but in Conclave, he’s forced to play the straight man. Lawrence is a worrier and a busybody, eager to pull strings but averse to attention — or so he says. He’s basically a Real Housewife, which makes Conclave the viral-ready pseudo-reality-TV show.

Every 20 minutes in the movie, there’s an elimination, so to speak, with anonymous voting and truces and late-night conversations. You’d half-expect to see Jeff Probst there in vestments of his own. Who will be the new pope? Stanley Tucci’s levelheaded Bellini? John Lithgow’s pompous Tremblay? What about the more conservative cardinals, like Lucian Msamati’s Adeyemi or Sergio Castellitto’s Tedesco? Giving the most right-wing cardinal a bright red vape feels like a classic reality-show move — you want a villain who kind of slays. But then there’s also Benitez (Carlos Diehz), who arrives unannounced (cue “a hot new bombshell has entered the villa”) and might make for a serious challenger to the Catholic establishment. And who could forget Isabella Rossellini — playing a character I assume is just named “Isabella Rossellini as nun” — who hovers off to the side, sending emails and holding secrets of her own?

Like X’s last, beloved meme’d awards movie — Todd Fields’s Tár — Conclave is a pleasant movie to watch about people being mean to each other. The titular Tár was cutting and unpleasant, harsh and provocative. Lydia Tar’s lack of self-awareness only made the character funnier and more pathetic in her downfall. So, too, does Conclave share characters who treat each other with the utmost lack of generosity in a way that is tempting to the viewer, if not a little recognizable. The memes work because these movies are both funny and idiosyncratic in their form. That men of the cloth behave badly is a feature. The overall effect is shockingly feel-good; perhaps what works best about the film is that Conclave is a movie about leftist in-fighting that actually lands upon a happyish ending (unlike, say, other recent events).

For a movie about the Catholic Church, there’s a surprising amount of self-awareness and levity to how the film treats its subject matter. Conclave isn’t sugarcoating the more unsavory sides of the Catholic Establishment so much as it is exposing and relishing in them. These holy men are no better than any of us once you put them in a big room together and force them to vote like its sixth-grade class president. For all its seriousness, there’s an archness and decadence to the whole affair. The robes are long and lush and heavy, the score dictates each twist and turn, and the buildings in which these people behave with such petty bitchery feature some of the most stunning Renaissance and Classical architecture. You wouldn’t see a movie like this with Protestants, that’s for sure.

Talking shit about people you know? That’s Conclave. Wearing a long and lush and heavy red robe? That’s Conclave. Stunning Renaissance and Classical architecture? That’s Conclave. Having to be in charge of handling logistics for a thing you don’t want to be in charge of because you have your doubts about the functionality of the system in the first place? You know it, I know it: That’s so Conclave.