Movie Review: Conclave…and could this blog not review this movie?

** 2/3 **

Spoiler Alert: I will absolutely try not to spoil this film for you, but in a sense I already have.  The enterprising among you who have no already seen it, might figure it out.

There is a star-studded cast acting out the election process of a new pope.  Isabella Rossellini, Ralph Fiennes, a slightly incongruous Stanley Tucci (and please excuse my ignorance, but how did he get famous?).  The acting is superb in parts, and Ralph Fiennes delivers a masterful performance.  He plays the Dean, the one who manages the process of the election.

Some of the other parts played, mostly candidates for pope, are somewhat caricatures.  The arch-conservative, the silly Italian, the bigot, the pious one, the schemer.  Movies do this often I suppose, not giving us the benefit of the doubt for seeing and perceiving subtlety, or simply not having the time to flesh out subtle character, so instead making it easier for the viewer to see right from wrong.

What movie review completely ignores the plot?  This one.  Why?  Because, amazingly, the plot itself is irrelevant.  Is it absurd to suggest that this is post-modern cinema at its finest?  A kind of meta-cinematic pastiche which in its elisions utterly removes the need for any plot whatsoever.  This is what cinema becomes when the plot is the servant of a message.

Whatever happened to storytelling?  Just a really great yarn?

Hollywood likes to manipulate us.  Only when people cry on screen, I like to feel it too.  When their emotions are mine, then the film comes to life.  In this case, when people cry you might instead be forgiven for noting ‘oh, that’s nice, the person is experiencing strong emotions or being able to say to yourself, ‘oh, that’s why that person did such and such.”

I guess I don’t like being manipulated.  It also feels lazy on the part of the author.

This movie was recommended to me by an industry insider, the Lover.  I should categorically like it.  Did I?  In a way.  I enjoyed watching it.  It was entertainment.  But I don’t like being preached to, no matter the message.

This film is political propaganda dressed up as entertainment.  It is very well done.  I was entertained even though I set the bar very high: I watch perhaps 2-3 films per year, no television at all, except for BBC news when something really big is going down.  Apart from that, I don’t watch anything, including on new media channels like YouTube.

A backhanded compliment.

And it is true that I like the message.  It is hard not to like a message in support of the meek.  Against the vainglorious and greedy, the corrupt, the cabal of white men.  And to love those who expose injustice, expose treachery, and stand courageously for truth, moral conduct.  These are things the world is in short supply of.

Will I recommend it?  Maybe.  But its hard for me to see myself in a conversation which might lead to this.  As an entertaining way to passively sit for 90 minutes, yay.  But is it a cultural touchstone that I would wish to be tied to should I make the recommendation.  

I guess not.

I don’t like stories that manipulate us and then give us homilies or a vision of happy outcomes that are utterly and profoundly too far from the truth to be real.  That’s why I abhor the Quentin Tarantino film Inglorious Basterds, as it makes a dreamy, idealistic retelling of history that I found profoundly offensive: the Jews did not beat the Nazis, they did not exact vengeance in the way that Tarantino’s fever dream did.  It is to me an irresponsible course to rewrite a horrific truth as a fantasy with a different outcome.  The Holocaust was a heinous blotch on human history, pretending or wish-thinking it was different is dangerous.

While this movie is pure fiction, it is guilty of a similar slip.  For the outcome of the film is beyond absurd, antithetical to the current reality and direction of the Catholic Church, and lands at a time when a majority of US citizens have voted in Donald Trump, and after a frenzy of destruction, whose popularity has risen amongst the faithful…the outcome, the plucking of the heart strings…these things are not possible in the current world.

Does it make you feel better to indulge in a fantasy that speaks of how a world might be better?  Sure, but is it helpful.  Is it actually entertainment?

And I guess that I just don’t like the idea that a bunch of punks in Hollywood think we are not smart enough to see characters with real bathos, energy, and complexity, or that we don’t just want an interesting story.  I don’t go to the cinema to be told that things are getting better when they are most manifestly getting worse.

So, my friend, the Lover, when she told me to see it, I am thinking that she wanted me to see the ending, and by doing so my feelings for her would be warmer because of the topic/outcome.  Instead I am left thinking that apart from one part of my person, why would she have recommended the movie?

And do you know what?  I’m not going to ask.

Would you?