On a whim over the weekend, I went to see Conclave, a Ralph Fiennes movie about choosing a new Pope. I wish I’d watched it at home.
Conclave, based on a 2016 book, starts with the Pope being dead, and Fiennes’ character Cardinal Lawrence in charge of running the show of picking a new one. This is not a straightforward process; through the course of the conclave, cardinals politick and backstab, secrets are revealed, and characters wrestle with their responsibility to shape the future of the Catholic Church and their own ambitions. There’s no way to explain my experience without talking about the end of the movie, which only came out last week. So I feel obligated to add a spoiler warning, even though doing so is exactly the thing I want to write about. So there you go; read on below to find out why I hate myself for this choice.
A small handful of papal candidates emerges through the film. I was rooting for the liberal-minded Bellini, played by Stanley Tucci, but it’s clear from the beginning that he doesn’t have the votes. Middle-of-the-road candidates get cut from the running as their past misdeeds or bad behavior regarding the conclave get revealed, and a lot of the drama of the film comes from a quietly intense Fiennes wrestling with his duty to the papacy and how he has to participate in the sneaking and backstabbing in pursuit of that duty. At the end, the two most viable candidates are the frighteningly conservative Cardinal Tedesco and the mysterious Cardinal Benitez, whom the Pope secretly made Cardinal of Kabul following his ministries in the Congo and Iraq. World events outside the conclave put Tedesco and Benitez in stark opposition and make the choice feel much bigger than just who the next Pope will be.
In the end, Benitez gets the most votes. But before he can be announced, Lawrence puts together the remaining pieces of his past. The Pope had paid for Benitez to go to a clinic in Geneva, and we find out in the movie’s penultimate scene that this was because Benitez learned in adulthood that he’s intersex, and the clinic visit was to get his uterus and ovaries removed. But Benitez ultimately didn’t get the surgery; he tells Lawrence “I am what God made me” and explains that he thought it would be sinful to alter God’s design. Lawrence says nothing about the conversation, and the movie ends with Benitez presumably becoming Pope.
As a trans man who is religious, I found Benitez’s position a very moving take on the usual line regarding gender-related surgeries from some corners of religion, and I loved the radical idea of a non-cis Pope. I gasped in delight when Benitez explained his situation. But the other people in my theater–on a Saturday afternoon, primarily elderly couples–didn’t have the same reaction: The majority of them laughed. Maybe it was because they saw the reveal itself as comical, or as a sign that for all Lawrence’s efforts to do the right thing he had picked the wrong Pope anyway, or just because the movie had one last secret up its sleeve. But their reaction was a shitty thing to experience, and as the lights came up, I rushed from the theater, not wanting to overhear anyone discussing the ending.
Director Edward Berger told Vanity Fair that he didn’t intend the end to be a shock, saying
We didn’t want to play it for shock value, by the way. We really wanted it to feel very natural and soft. This is Benitez. This is who he is; this is part of him. We wanted it to play as subtly and as sensitively as possible, and really not go for the big twist, sensational reveal.
…I do feel that we try to deal with [the reveal] with diligence, sensitivity, and not using it as a plot device or anything.
It’s hard for me to buy this. Characters’ trans identities coming to light has a long history of being played for drama, which Berger cannot excuse himself from simply by saying that’s not what he meant to do. Though every character in the film has secrets, by coming at the very end Benitez’s naturally gets more dramatic weight. As such, it inevitably gets painted as the movie’s biggest twist in coverage. Placing it at the end also means anyone writing about it–myself included–has to talk around it as a spoiler, which fits it into a long-standing trope of non-cis people’s genders being played as a surprise. All of this is surely what made my theater erupt in laughter, whether Berger intended that reaction or not.
In fairness to Berger, the moment is indeed played with subtlety, with both Fiennes and Carlos Diehz as Benitez tackling it with the same tenor as the rest of Conclave’s secrets. Everyone’s pasts raise questions about whether they are the right choice for Pope, as well as questions about what the “right” choice even means; while Benitez’s identity would be disqualifying based on the traditions of the Church, both it and his politics fit into the bigger questions about the future direction of the Church that Conclave highlights through its various papal candidates. Conclave features an understated subplot about nuns, which when combined with Benitez’s character, suggests gender issues in the Church are one theme the movie wants to explore, and one that fits within the movie’s bigger themes about progress versus tradition. If Lawrence had discovered the reason behind Benitez’s cancelled trip to Geneva sooner, if it had been just one more piece of information he had to wrestle with, gender might have taken center stage as the movie's defining issue. That’s a movie I, personally, would have seen, but it also would have made Conclave a movie about a different topic than it is. It also, let’s be honest, would have turned it into a movie that was unlikely to have drawn the audience full of elderly Brooklynites I saw it with.
A search headline from Slate highlights this: on Google, the hed reads “It Seemed Like This Year’s Safest Oscar Pick–Until It Revealed One Final Surprise.” On the page, that Slate hed reads “Is Conclave’s Twist Ending Honorable, Offensive, Or Just Plain Ridiculous?,” and the article itself digs into Conclave’s choice not to use the Church’s prevalent sex scandals as its primary topic, as well as whether Benitez’s election does justice to questions about gender in the Church. Writer Dana Stevens says of her viewing experience that “The climactic reveal did provoke some scattered laughs, but those struck me as guffaws of surprise, not derision. Translated into a verbal response, that laughter might have meant something like 'You got me, Berger—whatever I was expecting, it was not that.'”
I appreciate this interpretation, but it still can’t avoid casting Benitez’s identity as a “gotcha.” Berger can’t control the response of the audience, and was working with the source material of the book (which I haven’t read). But I think it’s naive of him to believe the ending would play the way he says he intended it, instead of how it played out in my theater experience.
I think I would be more likely to agree with Berger’s explanation of his intentions for that moment if I’d watched Conclave at home, where my reaction to the ending would have been the only one. Instead, I feel like I spent $16 to be surrounded by a bunch of people laughing at a character who wasn’t cis. And now, reading about the movie, I’m inundated with sensationalist headlines about twists and surprises like I’ve read about so many movies featuring trans characters. I tried to avoid the same choice in my own headline, but I also worry I'm playing into the same problem by writing about Conclave and its ending at all.
All this aside, Conclave was a fine semi-thriller, and I can appreciate what Berger was trying to do. At the end of the day the film probably has more to say about electoral politics than gender. I wish seeing it had been nothing more than a way to spend some time on a Saturday.
