Peter Viney's Blog

2024
Directed by Edward Berger
Screenplay by Peter Straughan
Based on Conclave by Robert Harris
Music by Volker Bertelmann

Streamed January 2025, Amazon Prime

CAST
Ralph Fiennes – Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence, British
Stanley Tucci – Cardinal Aldo Bellini, American liberal
John Lithgow – Cardinal Joseph Tremblay, Canadian moderate
Sergio Castellitto – Cardinal Gofferedo Tedesco, Italian traditionalist
Lucian Msamati – cardinal Joshua Adeymi, Nigerian conservative
Isabella Rossellini – Sister Agnes, head caterer and housekeeper
Carlos Diehz – Cardinal Victor Benitez, Mexican working in Afghanistan
Brian F. O’Byrne – Monsignor Raymond O’Malley, Lawrence’s assistant / researcher
Jacek Koman – Cardinal Janusz Wozniak, the late pope’s confidante

I have read and listened to more Robert Harris than any other author over the last few years. He is a great favourite for in-car audio books and one where we often arrive and stay in the car to the end of the chapter. Politics is a favourite theme (The Ghost, Precipice, Munich) as is religion (An Officer and A Spy, Conclave, Second Sleep, Act of Oblivion) and World War Two (Munich, V2, Fatherland) or classical Rome (Pompeii, Cicero trilogy).

Ideally he combines politics and religion as in Conclave. It seemed to us that the election of a new pope was the least likely audio book to appeal, but the story held us, and we were transfixed. For me the film is third time round, book, then audio book, and there are no surprises and here there will be no plot spoilers.

We streamed it, January 2025, for a swingeing £15.99, but then cinema the day before was £17 each. I wouldn’t have streamed either Gladiator II nor A Complete Unknown, but a lot of this story is close intrigue and the colour palette veers heavily to red and white. Or white and red sometimes. The accommodation building for cardinals is modern and grey and white.

Actually there are some classy overhead large shots, but even so it’s not the Battle of Salamis re-enacted in the Colosseum, nor is it the crowds at the Newport Folk Festival 1965.

The cast has four great favourites: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Lucian Msamati. All cardinals. Tucci is playing Italian-American as Bellini, so not a stretch on accents. Fiennes is the diffident Dean (Diffidently British) tasked with overseeing the election in the closed Vatican. They had to recreate it. You don’t get to film in the Sistine Chapel, but we do see a lot of staring at the recreated ceiling. You could get a decent ceiling painter in those days.

The traditionalists like Tedesco from Milan, are at loggerheads with the liberals like Bellini from America. Then we have the popular African, Adeymi, who is conservative, though not as far right as Tedesco, and the middle ground Canadian, Tremblay.

On Latin, we had subtitles on, but they didn’t subtitle the sections in Latin. I suppose we’re like the congregation in a pre-Reformation church, listening to the Latin and not understanding a word.

There’s a Eurovision song contest interest in watching the many rounds of voting, in that you might not care deeply who wins, but the numbers are fascinating, as are the obvious prejudices behind the votes. It turns out that candidate after candidate has a reason to be dropped, then there’s the rank outsider, Benitez, personally appointed by the late pope as Archbishop of Kabul, and secretly too. Add the nuns, splashes of blue among the sea of red and white, and urban terrorists abroad in Rome. There are several shots of food preparation. It’s Italy. Everyone gets to eat well.

Ralph Fiennes as Lawrence is the detective in all this, uncovering skeletons in virtually every closet as the votes shift among the candidates. He’s aligned with the liberals, who are terrified of Cardinal Tedesco of Milan taking the papacy back sixty years in time. Tedesco is simply the Italian for German. I was often told in Southern Italy that Milanese cuisine (too much cream and meat) was ‘Austrian’ therefore German. Was Benedict XVI, previously Cardinal Ratzinger, in Harris’s mind? The one who resigned? Er, the one who was in the Hitler Youth? Or far worse, Pius XII whose wartime opposition to Communism was so great that he was known as ‘The Pope of Silence’ over the Holocaust? I expand on that precisely because the film doesn’t – just that Tedesco is right wing and traditional.

Suffice it to say that Dean Lawrence does a little unauthorized snooping around, and uncovers scandals, sexual, financial, naked ambition. Then will they hand him the keys of St. Peter by default? Or not?

The story will hold you. The acting is first class and has already garnered awards, on the way to more. On the whole, in spite of some lovely shots, it’s a good streaming film.

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

RALPH FIENNES
Richard III, Almedia 2016 (Richard III)
Man & Superman, National Theatre
The Grand Budapest Hotel (film)
Cemetery Junction (film)
Hail Caesar! (film)
The King’s Man (film)
The Dig (film)

LUCIAN MSAMATI
Amadeus National Theatre (Salieri)
Othello RSC 2015 (Iago)
Comedy of Errors National Theatre 2012 (Dromio of Syracuse)
See How They Run (film)

JOHN LITHGOW
The Magistrate, by Pinero, NT Live 2013

STANLEY TUCCI
The King’s Man (film)
Gambit (film)
Burlesque (film)