Punters and Pushers

A last-minute entry to movies I watched in 2025! When I popped into the library yesterday, there was Conclave sitting on the New DVDs shelf, so of course I snatched it up and took it right home and watched it.

Conclave is about a fictional modern-day conclave to elect a new pope, and I’ve been chomping at the bit to see it since it came out because… I guess I am just into movies about the Catholic church… I don’t fully understand this about myself. It may just be the aesthetic. Gold! Red! Shiny things! Lots of candles! One can criticize many things about the Catholic Church but by God they’ve got a look.

Anyway, cardinals converge on Rome, all wearing their cardinal gear, and if like me you enjoy things like aerial shots of cardinals carrying white parasols crossing the courtyard of a vast church complex, you will find great visual delight in this movie. And the movie doesn’t bog down in explaining things like the white parasols either. We don’t need to know why they’re part of the cardinal’s vestments.

The plot of the movie centers on the machinations to elect the new pope, featuring a bunch of guys who desperately want to be pope but also desperately need to pretend that they are being forced into pope candidacy against their will, because other people believe they are the best candidate. At one point in my life I would have scoffed at this hypocrisy, but having endured many years of Donald Trump on the public scene, I have come to believe that actually it’s quite politically useful for candidates to have to hang back until other people more or less drag them bodily into candidacy.

At the center of this is Ralph Fiennes, and I regret to inform you that I remember almost none of the character names from this movie, because I really struggle to tell people apart when they are all dressed the same and also all look pretty similar, in this case a bunch of old white guys with a smattering of old guys of other races.

Ralph Fiennes, as I was saying, is playing the guy who is in charge of making sure the election runs smoothly, and also perhaps awkwardly is one of the candidates - against his will, of course. (Perhaps slightly more sincerely against his will than some of the others.) I saw him about a year ago in the National Theater recording of Antony and Cleopatra, where he plays the sottish, running to seed, impulsive and still dangerous Antony, and his character here is just about the opposite in every way, which raised my respect for his acting ability even more.

He is calm, controlled, thoughtful, and deeply compassionate, a quality perhaps most clear in the scene where he points out to another cardinal that his hopes to be pope are toast. On the surface this action seems almost brutal, but that clarity allows the other cardinal to grieve his dreams in private, instead of hoping against hope and watching them get smashed in public.

An absorbing movie. I didn’t love it quite as much as I hoped to love it, but I greatly enjoyed watching it nonetheless.