Editor’s Note: The following story contains major spoilers for the movie “Conclave,” now in theaters.
British screenwriter and playwright Peter Straughan is likely looking at a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination for “Conclave,” the gorgeous and engrossing papal thriller starring Ralph Fiennes. The actor plays a Vatican cardinal tasked with overseeing the selection of a new pope after the current one dies — and Straughan and Oscar-winning director Edward Berger (“All Quiet on the Western Front”) turn what looks like a conventional, Oscar-baiting awards play into a gossipy, bitchy crowdpleaser where the cardinals hit the vapes and spread secrets about one another.
“Conclave” is an extremely faithful adaptation of Robert Harris’s compact 2016 novel, with only some names and personages reshuffled for the film version. Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is a man of dignity dealing with four main candidates for a new pope. There’s Bellini (Stanley Tucci), brazenly liberal to the point of encouraging gays and women to have a place in the refectory. Adeyemi (Lucian Msmati), a conservative Nigerian with skeletons in the closet. Tremblay (John Lithgow), corrupt and prone to blackmail. And Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), an Italian traditionalist who wants to rewrite history and global allegiances without playing to the times.
Retaliation for all this coming to the surface abounds. But the sleeper dark horse contender is Benitez (Carlos Diehz), an archbishop from Kabul who ends up winning the position. Then there’s Isabella Rossellini as a glowering nun who’s seen some shit, and serves as an accomplice to Lawrence in outing his colleagues as hypocrites.
As Cardinal Lawrence learns in the film’s closing moments, Benitez is intersex, raised male by his parents but with male and female sex organs. And as revealed during the pope vetting process, Benitez recently canceled on a hysterectomy (paid for by the last, and most recently dead, pope) that would’ve forced him to step down as a cardinal if made public, making him suddenly the most scandal-unscathed candidate for becoming the pope. It was only through a years-ago appendectomy as an adult, as he explains to Lawrence, that Benitez learned he had a uterus at all. “I am as God made me,” Benitez says. Lawrence chooses to tacitly keep Benitez’s secret, and that’s (surprise!) how the movie ends: with a twist seemingly out of the sky, and Benitez as our new pope. But is that twist so from nowhere as we think it might be?
Straughan and Berger tried to carefully build the approach to this seeming deus ex machina throughout the film — foreshadowing it even to the point of showing Cardinal Lawrence examining an unused razor in Benitez’s room, which comes straight from the book, suggesting Benitez is not participating in the regular practices of masculinity.
That Straughan’s adaptation is almost subserviently faithful was never a question, according to the screenwriter in an interview with IndieWire. “The book, it’s very precise and controlled. It worked within a sort of emotional bandwidth. It worked well as a thriller plot,” he said. “Sometimes, I’ve worked on books where you really restructure them hugely. This was one of the ones that ended up being quite faithful. So it felt more like there was some keyhole surgery done at various places rather than ripping out the appendix.” (How apropos.)
In “Conclave” the movie and the book, Lawrence (called Lomeli in the novel) and Bellini (name unchanged) have extended conversations about welcoming women and gay people into the Vatican. That’s reflective of the current Pope Francis, who’s been largely commended for his liberal viewpoints. “[The book] told from within the patriarchy, the biggest patriarchy in the world. It’s told from within the POV of a believer,” Straughan said. “The book is quietly subversive in that Lawrence ends up being involved in deconstructing the pieces entirely. It’s in pieces by the time it’s finished. If Lawrence, at the beginning of the film, had seen where it was going to end up, he would have been horrified. I thought that was an interesting idea, that the Lord works in mysterious ways, and you might not like the direction he takes things in.”
By the end of the film, Lawrence has outed the top four contenders as total frauds, whether in terms of systemic extortion or past transgressions they tried to hide. (The homophobic and reactionary Adeyemi, for example, turns out to have a love child with a nun who comes forward with a little help from Rossellini’s Sister Agnes.) But to get there takes a grueling voting process in which the cardinal body must come to a majority vote. It takes many cycles, and a Muslim suicide bomber at the Sistine Chapel, and much backstabbing as cardinals like Tremblay and Bellini are revealed to be not men of their words, to urge the process along. Straughan’s agnostic relationship to the Catholic Church helped him realize why Cardinal Lawrence — who does not want the papacy whatsoever — ends up believing in Benitez as the successor.
“I was brought up Catholic, so I’m no longer a believer, but I was interested in exploring that world,” Straughan said (“I wish I had some sort of melodramatic story,” he said about leaving Catholicism. “When I hit my teens, it just fell away.)
“There’s a moment where Lawrence is giving his homily. I remember reading it in the book, reaching it in the book where he says, ‘God, give us a pope who will doubt.’ And I really liked that, and I found that quite electrifying because this was a few years ago, but things were already becoming horrifically polarized in the world. And even more so now, the idea that the quietly revolutionary stance is to embrace doubt rather than certainty. That felt like a character I wanted to get behind.”
How to telegraph Benitez’s gender identity so that the audience isn’t totally thrown off guard by the end of “Conclave” was an issue Straughan tussled with — especially with regards to Lawrence discovering that unused razor in Benitez’s room. “I took it back out, I put it back in again, and the ending was the thing I found trickiest and made me most nervous. Could we get away with playing it that late in the book? It happens right at the end … which made me nervous because normally you think with something like that you wanted some digestion period after it. And I tried putting it early, and it just didn’t work early in the narrative. So then it was also about, ‘Do we want to telegraph? Is that useful to telegraph this, or do we want it to feel like this deus-ex-machina-almost effect at the end?’ So there was a lot of toing and froing on it. In the end, we did put it in. Unless you already know, I don’t think you could make sense of that really.”
Going into “Conclave,” a story about Cardinals fretting about in the Vatican over personnel problems, you assume you’re walking into a movie about sex abuse or any other headline-grabbing issue plaguing the Catholic Church in Italy. But “Conclave” has way slyer twists under its crimson-red robes.
“You know things about the kinds of areas that Benitez has been in, but to be honest, I don’t think I wanted [the ending] to feel like, ‘Oh that was expected or inevitable.’ To me, there was something quietly subversive about the idea that Lawrence, who’s listening to guidance from God, quietly thinks he’s heard that, in the moment when he votes for Benitez, and he thinks, clear conscience, ‘I’ve done the right thing. He is the best pope.’ Then he finds out this shattering news about Benitez… I liked that, [the idea of] ‘Don’t predict the way God wants the world to go.’ And there was an element of ‘you old men get out the way for the new,’ which I liked as well.”
Straughan was nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar in 2012 for Tomas Alfredson’s juicy John le Carré adaptation “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” But between that celebrated Cold War spy thriller and “Conclave,” there have been a few lemons — namely, “The Snowman” ($43 million worldwide and awful reviews), the Alfredson-directed serial killer thriller he adapted from Norwegian author Jo Nesbø’s suite of Harry Hole detective novels. And “The Goldfinch” ($9 million worldwide and also awful reviews), the only big-screen adaptation of author Donna Tartt’s work even amid fervor around the still wildly popular skull-and-bones-esque dark academia page-turner “The Secret History” and Southern murder mystery “The Little Friend.”
Directed by “Brooklyn” filmmaker John Crowley and starring Ansel Elgort as a born-into-money dilettante whose life is altered after his mother is killed in a museum bombing, 2019’s “The Goldfinch” was beaten against the rocks by critics. For its long running time and handsomely shot inertia, but also for its Cliff’s Notes-adjacent condensing of a massive quote-unquote Great American Novel.
Straughan, when asked about the film’s disappointing debut, did not mince words. “When something doesn’t work, you know it yourself,” he said. “There was a decision we made, which was the wrong one, a very early one, it would have made a better TV miniseries than it would a film. If we’d done it like a four-episode thing. Because there were so many major events, major dramatic events, I think if that had been spread over a series, it would’ve been OK. Compressed into a two-hour film, it started to tip into melodrama. You know, the mother dying, the father dying, it sort of devolved into feeling soapy, maybe. I think it was probably a mistake from the beginning.”
Did he realize that in the process or not until it was completed? “I’d like to say I did. I don’t think so. You always think, ‘Maybe we’re going to get away from it.’ It didn’t feel [like] ‘well, this is absolutely working.’ But often you’re in the gray zone of thinking, ‘Is this working or not?’ Sometimes you don’t know until you put it in front of an audience.”
“Conclave” is now in theaters from Focus Features.
