The case for Conclave
Set within the intriguing hushed corridors of the Vatican, Conclave is a quietly brilliant contender for Best Picture
Focus Features
- Caroline Frost
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Of all this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Picture, from the epic (Dune: Part Two) to the esoteric (Emilia Pérez), it is Conclave that carries the baton for conversational, contemplative film-making that eschews super-sentiment and sensationalism. The follow-up to All Quiet on the Western Front from German director Edward Berger leans into its majestic setting to create a deceptively serene environment for passionate power-play and all-too-human interaction, and shares a wonderful script between actors all working at the peak of their skill. In short, it’s the kind of film that used to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards in years gone by.
Unlike its rivals in this category, Conclave is a story in a world kept deliberately narrow – within the corridors and private rooms of the innermost parts of the Vatican, beneath the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – and deliberately limited in timescale. The cardinals summoned to Rome on the sudden death of the Pope are cloistered, as is the age-old custom, away from the real world and its concerns, without complete success as we learn, into the conclave of the title; they have only one job, to farewell their leader and elect his successor.
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The dramatisation of this ancient process is rich with detail: the red of the Cardinals’ cassocks stark against the white of the Vatican, their voting papers being carefully burnt, the smoke appearing from the chimney above. Against this background of ritual, the cardinals, in most genteel fashion, jostle for position, often in secret meetings on staircases, where alliances are formed then broken, and dilemmas arise between ideology, pragmatism and, above all, power. Robert Harris clearly found fertile soil in his 2016 bestselling novel, lovingly adapted for screen by BAFTA winner Peter Straughan.
By necessity in depicting this world, it is a male-dominated film (the screen reflecting the Vatican where some lifelong serving nuns recently shared they had never met the Pontiff) but it is telling that Isabella Rossellini’s eight minutes on screen as housekeeper Sister Agnes have been enough to secure her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod. Even in this hermetically sealed space, a woman’s presence – and what she has to say – proves a turning point.
Isabella Rossellini stars as Sister Agnes in Conclave. Focus Features
Every performance is sublime, even the sometimes hammy Stanley Tucci adapting his tone to suit the confines of the whispering walls. At the centre of it all is Ralph Fiennes’s towering, troubled presence as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, tasked with overseeing a faithful, but also fortuitous, election process. The consistently excellent Fiennes has long been the bridesmaid throughout awards season – his Oscar tally remains no wins from two previous nominations (better than at BAFTA, where he has come away empty-handed six times since his 1993 win for Schindler’s List). Surely it's time to reward his efforts.
Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence in Conclave Black Bear UK
The recent BAFTAs told the story of this season: no runaway favourite, instead two very different horses initially out in front: Emilia Pérez, which was bought and streamed by Netflix, and The Brutalist, which comes in at 3 hours 35 minutes, even offering an old-school intermission for cinema-goers. Pérez, though, has all but fallen off the stage, after an awards campaign that even Netflix boss Bela Bajaria calls “a bummer” – namely that uncovered old tweets by its lead actress Karla Sofía Gascón revealed anti-Islamic sentiment, comments on the murder of George Floyd and even pokes at the diversity aims of the Oscars (Gascón is trans).
John Lithgow stars as Cardinal Tremblay in Conclave. Alamy
The Best Actress nominee has been all but cancelled from awards season, the film’s fortunes have floundered, and Zoe Saldaña was lucky to bag a gong for her supporting role, one of only two awards from ten nominations. The Brutalist, meanwhile, has come in for scrutiny regarding its use of AI technology to support the lead actors Hungarian-speaking moments: not a good look for a film made the same year almost everyone in movie-land went out on strike to protest against that very thing and the risk it posed to real-life, hard-working human actors.
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It would be beautifully fitting if these and other titles were to compete for Oscar glory, only to falter and fall away, leaving the quietly brilliant Conclave to conquer. As with the ways of the Vatican, so with the Academy – might there be a last-minute twist?
Authors
Caroline Frost
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