Director: Edward Berger
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini
Have I Seen it Before: Never. Having been waylaid by the Oklahoma Flu for the better part of a month, I’m sad to admit that I’ve missed most (read: all but Dune: Part Two (2023)) of the best picture contenders for this year. Luckily, Peacock had me covered and only jammed two minutes of commercials into my eyes at the top.
Did I Like It: I’ve found myself, and really only since my recent viewing of The Exorcist (1973), strangely admiring of the Catholic clergy. I mean, I haven’t gone completely insane. I’m not going to take an entirely new theological viewpoint, and I could really spend the rest of the review talking about all of the bad things that the Catholic church has perpetrated through their myopia. But the best among them seem intellectually curious and ultimately confront doubt with some regularity.
On that front, I immensely enjoyed the film. The deep dive into papal politics kept me rapt with the same level of interest of any political drama. My sympathies naturally went with the more liberal cardinals, and that’s only partially because Stanley Tucci can’t avoid being likable*, even when he’s engaging in some underhanded machinations.
My only real reservation about the film lies with the third act. There’s a twist, I suppose, in just who becomes Pope at the end of the titular conclave. I won’t spoil it for you, but some might clutch their pearls at the turn. The turn itself isn’t my problem, though. It’s that the twist doesn’t seem to come from anything else that happens in the film. It almost feels like the ending of some other film about gender politics in the Vatican found itself grafted onto this film. I far more enjoyed the road to that twist than the twist itself.
*Truly, they had to pit the man against Tom Hanks to make him anything less than likable in The Terminal (2004).