Conclave

Spoiler alert: if you want to see Conclave without knowing the big surprise, you should skip the next-to-last paragraph of this post.

"Bleh," I thought to myself as we left the theater last night. I wondered if I might feel more enthusiastic after I'd had some time to think about it, but "bleh" is what I continue to think.

The most frustrating part of the movie was its failure to present Catholic outlooks and habits of thought in a plausible way. We never see the cardinals at Mass; openness to the movement of the Holy Spirit is only explicit once, when a cardinal is making an egregiously self-serving case for his own election.

In one scene a cardinal enumerates the positions he will hold if elected, and there might as well be a supertitle: Filmmakers Fail To Do Their Homework. I guess, if you're not Catholic, you could imagine a pope free to say whatever he likes and change whatever he chooses, but it doesn't actually work like that. Are there cardinals expressing naked contempt for large families among their fellows? It's possible, but I'd be pretty shocked. The other end of the ideological spectrum is also presented in an ugly light, with its chief representative calling members of another religion "animals." Again, it wouldn't be totally impossible to see a cardinal loudly defying the core Catholic tenet that every human is profoundly beloved and has immense intrinsic dignity, but his speech yoinked my implausiblometer right up into the red zone.

I number no cardinals among my friends, but I've known a lot of priests over the years. It's hard for me to imagine that anyone would actually want to be pope. What a weight! What a yoke! Hardly any professors actually want to be department chairs, because the administrative stuff is not what we signed up for. Church leadership seems a zillion times harder.

{SPOILERS AHOY} The twist at the end is that the unknown cardinal (OH ALSO, can we talk about the dean defining "in pectore" for the college of cardinals? really?? they couldn't arrange for him to define it for an audience who didn't already know what it meant?) is intersex. I had thought since his first scene that he would turn out to be trans, but I was not surprised by the big reveal. Except-- I think the filmmakers also get it wrong about intersex people. They suggest that this character has ovaries (explicitly plural) as well as testes, but I think intersex people have two gonads just like most of the rest of us. It felt clunky and heavy-handed, like they were thwacking the audience over the head with the idea that the Church needs someone with ovaries to save her.

Good parts: I did like the Ralph Fiennes performance, and I enjoyed the flow of multiple languages through the movie. Lots of Latin, which was fun. It was visually arresting, with all the cardinals dressed in red. I worried that it would be hard for me to follow a movie in which everyone dresses alike, since I have subpar face recognition skills. But it wasn't a problem. I think I'm glad I saw it, though it does continue to vex me that Hollywood is so bad at portraying faith and goodness in a recognizable way.