Even Worse Than <em>The Da Vinci Code</em>

This essay contains spoilers.

The new movie Conclave is a faithful adaptation of Robert Harris’s 2016 novel—and an absurd portrait of the Catholic Church. A thriller about the politicking that occurs when cardinals gather to elect a new pope, it depicts a clash between racist conservatives and supposedly insightful liberals who talk like a cross between an HR manual and a greeting card. Although the film’s hero describes “certainty” as the enemy, the movie has no doubt about who the bad guys are. Not even a subtle, intelligent performance from Ralph Fiennes can salvage the film’s simplistic morality.

No one expects a movie to be a doctrinal treatise, but Conclave’s blithe approach to Catholic teaching spoils the drama. The best art about the Catholic Church doesn’t necessarily endorse its tenets, but it at least takes them seriously. Novels such as Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour found tragic and comic potential in the Church’s most difficult and otherworldly teachings. They asked questions like, What if marriage really is indissoluble, and a character resolves to act accordingly? The answers were never easy, but they were always interesting. Conclave is incapable of tapping the dramatic potential of Catholic dogma, for the simple reason that the dogma it believes in is not Catholic but progressive.

Early on, we are introduced to Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a wily Italian traditionalist who tries to persuade another cardinal to vote for him in order to prevent an African from getting elected. Tedesco, who longs for the days of the Latin Mass, naturally believes that only a European should be pope. In Conclave, racism and ritualism go together like bread and wine. In the real world, however, traditionalist Catholics have no greater friend in the highest reaches of the Church than Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah.

[Read: Martin Scorsese’s radical act of turning theology into art]

Standing opposite Tedesco are the liberals, led by Cardinal Lawrence (Fiennes). Lawrence opens the conclave with a homily that declares, “Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.” This claim, treated as a searing insight, does nothing to diminish the certainty of his fellow progressives. While claiming to favor “tolerating other views within our own Church,” they resolve to do everything in their power to stop Tedesco.

In one scene, Lawrence uses the sacrament of confession to extract information from a nun about a rival cardinal who had sex with her years before. Employing the sacrament for one’s own purposes, as Lawrence does, is a grave act of spiritual abuse. So is what he does next: Lawrence confronts the offending cardinal with what he has learned—thus breaking the confessional seal.

All of this could make for good drama, in a film that regarded the Catholic sacraments as capable of commanding belief. If Lawrence were genuinely Catholic, he would be racked by his conscience as he weighed his sacramental transgression against the noble aim of preventing an unworthy man from becoming pope. Instead, he intones something about his respect for the sacrament he has just violated, and moves on.

A similar flippancy emerges at the end of the film, when the newly elected Pope Innocent is revealed to be intersex. Catholic sacramental theology holds—for reasons grounded in scripture and elaborated over the course of centuries—that only a man can be ordained a priest, let alone made pope. A more interesting film might have dramatized the ironies arising from a doctrine that holds that an evil man can ascend to an office from which even the holiest woman is barred. But Conclave treats Catholic theology as mere policy, like the membership rules at Augusta National.

One effect of doctrinal limits is to constrain the powerful. If a rule is understood to have been laid down by Christ, not even a cardinal or a pope can undo it. If Catholic doctrine can change, however, the high and mighty have more freedom to remake the faith as they please—a fact that Conclave celebrates.

The film holds up Lawrence as an exemplary “manager,” as the late pope described him. Lawrence employs his procedural acumen both to enforce the rules of the conclave and to set them aside—whichever ensures the outcome he deems best. He blatantly manipulates the voting process. He digs up damaging information on leading candidates, breaking into the sealed chambers of the dead pope and violating the conclave’s ban on outside information by publicizing a dossier that swings the election. For these acts of interference, liberals praise him. “That firm hand of yours has its admirers,” a like-minded cardinal says.

If Lawrence is the image of a responsible managerial elite, his ideological opposite, Tedesco, is the ecclesial version of a conservative populist. He maintains that the Church’s leadership has fallen into lassitude and corruption since Vatican II, and his crude manners and colorful speech hint at a working-class background that he is happy to play up. (Harris’s book reports that he comes from a peasant family.)

The film explicitly proposes a parallel between sacred and secular politics, in case anyone missed the point. At one late-night meeting, a cardinal complains, “I feel as if I’m at some American political convention.” The machinations become so elaborate that another cardinal jokes that he is poised to become “the Richard Nixon of popes.” For Conclave, there is no real distinction between Church politics and electoral politics, between a Cardinal Tedesco and a Donald Trump. It’s all a power game in which anything is justified for the right cause.

[Read: The Exorcist and the lost art of Catholic storytelling]

If the movie has a saving grace, it is the way the camera admiringly lingers on the visible expressions of Catholic belief—the cassocks and tassels, the red silk and white smoke. Perhaps the most striking scene is the one in which Lawrence is carefully vested in his holy livery. These images will communicate the Church’s charisma to some viewers, despite the film’s failure to reckon with the claims that underlie the visuals.

Nonetheless, in its crude view of the Church and its lack of genuine drama, Conclave is even worse than the last great ecclesial potboiler, The Da Vinci Code. That earlier movie was pulpier, including a brief flash of a ritual sex scene. And Tom Hanks’s performance, which is probably less remembered than his hairdo, does not compare to that of Fiennes. But The Da Vinci Code was in a certain way the more intelligent film. Despite its hysterical suggestion that the Catholic Church is a grand conspiracy of albino monks and Hispanic prelates devoted to covering up the fact that Jesus fathered a child, it at least recognized that sacramental ideas, including the all-male priesthood, are central to Catholic belief. Conclave fails because it takes itself—and not its subject—seriously.