The Conclave (2024)

The Mystery of Faith/The Sin of Certainty

or

"The Church Is What We Do Next"
 

The Pope is dead. Time to find a new one.

 

The Catholic church is steeped in ritual and arcana, seeing as how it's been around for 2000 years. Lord knows when all the niceties were developed (as He didn't come up with them), the breaking of the seal, the sealing of the Pope's quarters, the voting in secret among the council of cardinals in a locked, darkened room with no communion to the outside world. 

 

The smoke. 

 

It's a bit like the electoral college, as the Catholics in the world have no say, only the carefully chosen cardinals, get to choose who will be the next successor to Peter, the first Pope. 

 

But, he will be a man. That is the only certainty. Nuns need not apply. It's the way it's always been and, God only knows, it will be that way for a very long time. For God speaks only through the chosen few and only they have the power to change things...if God lets them know. Pity about Him not speaking to women, although a lot of them, Joan of Arc, being a burning example, would contradict that assumption.

Just ask Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) of The Conclave. He was close to the late Pope, close enough that he'd personally asked to resign his special position as dean of the cardinals. But, the Pope refused him to Lawrence's mystification. Lawrence was having a crisis of faith. As he explains to one of his fellow cardinals, Bellini (Stanley Tucci), what he's lost faith in was the Church, he's never lost faith in God. But, now the Pope is dead, and as dean of the cardinals it is Lawrence's function to convene the conclave of cardinals that will select the next Pope, with all the ritual and preparation and in-fighting and...politics. Lawrence is one of the leading contenders, but he doesn't want the job. Not like this. Not like he is. But, he will conduct the conclave. But, he has doubts.

Apparently, so did the late Pope, enough to demand that Lawrence stay at his post. As hard as it is to separate Church and State, it is damn near impossible to keep politics out of the Church and the vacuum of power threatens to suck in the best and the worst of the cardinals, each to their own nature. The world changes fast and the Church (if it does) is slow to catch up. There are those that would see an Italian pope and only an Italian pope and that the Mass and all business be conducted in Latin—most prominent of them would be Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), who is intolerant of change and resentful of changes that have occurred—have a Friday dinner with him and he'll have the fish.

Then, there are Lawrence and Bellini, progressives, who want to see a more inclusive church, changes in doctrine, less fire and brimstone. And there are the moderates, like Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow) and Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), who are highly regarded and well-connected and have a chance at being elected by the conference of cardinals. As they gather from around the world to be locked away in seclusion there is a lot of last-minute maneuvering and...a lot of smoking. It doesn't look to be a slam-dunk for any candidate.

But, Lawrence—who is also a considered candidate and who (of course) doesn't want the job—has begun to hear things. Things like the late Pope having a last-minute conference with Tremblay where ("they" say) he was asked to resign...but refused. An incident in the lunch-room involving Adeyemi and one of the nun-servers raises questions and temperatures. Lawrence pulls the old "we're priests, you're just nuns" argument to obtain information out of Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini) about the parties involved. But, he's more than willing to break tradition (and a couple wax seals) to get to the bottom of things.

Several commandments are revealed broken in The Conclave by the cardinal's detective work (good thing Father Brown wasn't there!) including bribery, subterfuge and a few others that might spoil the resolution and there are a lot of Deadly Sins going on (Bellini challenges Lawrence's supposed lack of ambition by asking him if he's thought of what his Pope-name would be...and, of course, he has), but the only one you won't find anywhere is "sloth."

German director Edward Berger (he made the excellent 2022 version of All Quiet on the Western Front) makes sure that the film has the proper solemnity but not so much that you fall asleep in church. The movie is never less than beautifully shot (by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine)—Rome never looked so good (probably because so much of it's in Cinecittà)—and Berger is less dependent on the single-point perspective than normal although he will go to it to make a grand impact (and, really, how could he help it as most churches are designed around a one point perspective.

But, he also has a cast of character actors who are adept at stealing scenes usually in conflict with Fiennes, who has the God-given power to command your attention. Talk all you want about the work that went into recreating the Sistine Chapel for this film, but you have a marvelous opportunity to see a master class in performing sotto voce that can propel you out of your seat when Fiennes turns it into a bark. We're talking measured performances of actors playing characters hiding something and being pious about it. That's some nuanced acting there.

There's a lot of Oscar buzz around this movie, not undeservedly, but, it's mere murmurs now and we'll see if we still hear it by year's end. Certainly there'll be a lot of nominations. But, voting for the Oscar has a lot of the same background as chicanery voting for the Pope. We'll just see what happens when the smoke clears.

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Butterflies Not Included

or

"Germany Will Soon Be Empty" (The Ever-Diminishing Perspective)

 

"We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing from ourselves, from our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces."

Im Westen nichts Neues "Nothing New in the West" 

Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front"—not an exact translation of the title, but it's stuck in the vernacular—created a sensation on its publication (in magazines form November 1928 and in book-form January 1929). Within a year, the author's fictionalization of his time during the first World War had been bought by Hollywood and made into an Oscar-winning film (for "Best Production") by Lewis Milestone. There was a TV version in 1979, directed by Delbert Mann, which won a Golden Globe for Best TV Movie—it was filmed in Czechoslovakia—and an Emmy Award for editing.

 

There was considerable buzz in the air around the Holidays in its being mentioned for Oscar nominations—and not just for Best Foreign Film. Frequent Twitterers mentioned it as a contender for the Best Picture short list.

Now Netflix has sponsored a new version of All Quiet on the Western Front (I guess you need 40 years or so to pass before doing it again—as if we weren't reminded enough that war is hell). The story of "Paul"* (played by Felix Kammerer—who seems genetically predisposed to have a "Thousand Yard Stare") one of a number of young German students, spurred by the patriotic speeches of their professors to join the German Army and to fight. Their teachers and academics fill their heads with dreams of glory and burnished reputations in protecting the Fatherland (who were the aggressors, if memory serves). But, once they tramp out to the trenches at the front lines, they learn different. They're stuck in shit-holes, where they arbitrarily wait for their generals (safely ensconced away from the battles**) to launch attacks that will gain them mere yards of ground, only to have them taken back when the French attack later. The absolute futility of the First World War was in how both sides traded time in each other's trenches.

Director-writer Edward Berger has changed a few things (from the novel). He starts—as with most of the segments—with beautiful shots of the terrain, forests, the natural world. Picturesque contrasts with what will come after—the grays and browns of the trench area punctuated with barbed wire strung on fallen crucifixes. The trenches are ramshackle caves where the soldiers huddle with the rats and offer little protection from aerial attacks. It's like the graves are already dug for the soldiers—they just don't know it yet.

After the beauty shots, Berger cuts to an attack—prior to Paul and his chums being sent to the line. It goes badly. The dead are catalogued, with their dog-tags broken in half (that's how they keep count of the kills and who's "winning"), graves are dug, and their uniforms recycled. Bullet holes and rips are repaired and readied for the next batch of soldiers—Berger will do a call-back on that later. But, it makes the point. The lives of the German troops are just as recyclable as the equipment. When one dies, another is put in their place. They're literally cannon fodder, indistinguishable from another. For small patches of ground.

But, there's an added element here. Ever since Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, there has been an artistic dichotomy to supposedly "anti-war" films.*** They're beautiful. Films like Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. Sam Mendes' 1917. There's horrendous, ugly carnage, absolutely (all wars look the same from the inside), but there is also a directorly effort to make some shots as beautifully lit as possible. Michael Herr mentioned it—that dichotomy—after working with Kubrick on his Vietnam film. And Bergen is no exception. One of the things that bothered me about 1917 was how beautiful it looked (thanks to cinematographer Roger Deakins) and wondered if that was enticing to potential recruits, the way the Top Gun movies are. Is this the film-making equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot?

Another thing got to me about the film. There is something called "One Point Perspective" Kubrick used it a lot in The Shining and 2001. Wes Anderson's films are masterclasses on one-point perspective. Here, Berger uses it to the extreme. At one point, there's a sequence in a train station with a slightly off-axis that I thought, "Oh, he's not going to center the train in the shot. Good choice."

I had thought too early. Within a minute, Bergen had moved the camera until, like it was on a track or something, the camera hit the mark so that the train was perfectly centered. Perfectly. Centered.

But, it is an interesting choice. Both Kubrick and Mendes used that technique to make an almost vertiginous experience, sucking you into the screen...and the story (when you're not distracted by all that symmetry, of course).

Berger does some interesting things with the script, as well. A whole section where Paul goes home and is repulsed by his household's fascination for the war is reduced to a single line in a bivouac sequence. And as persistent as he is with the perspective issue, he isn't as dedicated to the book's reluctance to show anything beyond Paul's perspective. He inter-cuts the scenes at the front with the attempts by Matthias Erzberger (played by Daniel Brühl) to sign an armistice with the French, which as protracted and stilted as it is, still manages to convey some tension about the outcome of our singular hero.

It's an odd push-pull kind of dynamic that the film presents: the country that launched the war makes a film about it, not neglecting the bloody carnage or the irresponsibility of its generals, but making pains to show its humiliation in negotiating the armistice; showing the waste and destruction, but also including decorously-lit sequences that romanticize it; criticizing the war and its costs, while also making it romantic and poignant. One can acknowledge a film's worth, but also be deeply cynical about it, at the same time.

I can my reaction to it can be briefly summed up in that I watched it with English sub-titles—the film, as it should be, is in German—that are none too subtle. And at one point, had the foresight to clue me in to what I was not hearing.

* "Paul," by the way was Remarque's real middle name; he changed his pen-name to "Maria" to honor his mother.

 

** See Paths of Glory. No. Really. See Paths of Glory. 

 

 *** Notice I didn't mention Oliver Stone's Platoon? Can the lack of romantic lighting in that film be because Stone actually fought in the Vietnam War.