Since Pope Francis died not long after the release of the movie Conclave, which is about the death of a pontiff and the selection of his successor, Lev Cinemas is bringing the film back to its theaters all over the country for the next few weeks.
Conclave, directed by Edward Berger, who made the 2022 All Quiet on the Western Front, details the political infighting among the cardinals and features a fine cast, which is led by Ralph Fiennes and includes Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow.
The movie, based on a novel by Robert Harris, won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay and it received high praise for its accuracy in presenting the selection process. Given that the film is about a small group of powerful men who make their decisions in secrecy, you might guess that there would be a politically correct twist in the third act, and you would be right. Isabella Rossellini plays the female lead, a nun who gets to criticize how the church continues to sideline women.
It’s just the latest of many movies made over the years about the papacy, and many of these have to do with the inherently dramatic process of papal succession, with those strange details like the fact that cardinals may not leave until the new pope is elected, and that they telegraph their choices by sending up black smoke to show that they are still deadlocked or white to reveal that there is a new pope.
If you’ve got white-smoke fever, there are many options.
1. Easily the most enjoyable and accessible movie about papal succession is Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope (Habemus Papam) from 2011. It features a great performance in the lead role by Michel Piccoli, who was 86 when he made it and has since passed away.
Piccoli, who starred in such classics as Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, is perfect as an unassuming cardinal who freaks out when he is his peers’ compromise choice to be the next pope. He refuses to address the crowds in St. Peter’s Square or assume any of his duties.
Moretti portrays a psychiatrist brought in to help him, but the treatment fails, and the pope sneaks out and wanders in Rome’s modest neighborhoods, totally anonymous. His childhood dream was to be an actor, and he is cast in a community theater production of a Chekhov play. Meanwhile, the psychiatrist isn’t allowed to leave the Vatican and keeps the cardinals busy playing cards and volleyball.
Moretti’s films are always quirky and interesting, and this one looks at the very human reaction of an ordinary man who is thrust into an almost super-human role from which he recoils, a wry commentary on the belief that the pope is somehow closer to God than the rest of us.
2. Probably the most famous papal drama up until Conclave was The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), based on the bestseller by Morris West, which stars Anthony Quinn as a Russian priest who escapes from the Gulag and eventually becomes pope. A little like in We Have a Pope, he slips off to “walk in the shoes of the fisherman,” and spends time among common people all over the world.
At one point, he recites a Hebrew prayer over a dying Jewish man and eventually negotiates foreign policy with the Chinese to try to avert a world war. The supporting cast includes Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Vittorio De Sica. It was considered an important movie when it was released, but now its style is very dated.
If you're looking for a female-led papal drama…
3. If most of these papal dramas are too male-oriented for you, try Pope Joan (1972), starring Liv Ullmann in an English-language drama based on a myth that a woman disguised herself as a monk and eventually was named pope in medieval Europe.
The supporting cast includes Trevor Howard as Pope Leo and Olivia de Havilland as a mother superior. Ullmann is always good but seems constricted by the good intentions of the material and gives one of her least compelling performances.
While everyone knows Ullmann was Ingmar Bergman’s partner and muse, it isn’t as well known that she later married Donald Saunders, a Jewish real-estate developer. They later divorced but stayed together, and they donated to many cultural institutions in Israel.
4. John Gielgud was cast as a pope again in The Scarlet and the Black, a 1983 television movie about how the Vatican joined forces with a church official played by Gregory Peck to save Allied POWs as the Nazis took over Rome.
5. The Two Popes, a 2019 movie, is a fictionalized look at the relationship between then-Pope Benedict (Anthony Hopkins), who is conservative about church reform, and Jorge Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce), the archbishop of Argentina who worked extensively with the poor and who is ready to retire. We know that Bergoglio will later become Pope Francis, and it’s basically a series of dialogues between the two about faith and philosophy. It’s talky but the two great actors make it as lively as they can.
6. The Borgias, a 2011 miniseries, stars Jeremy Irons as Rodrigo Borgia, a libertine scion of the notorious Borgia clan, who eventually becomes Pope Alexander VI but doesn’t let being the leader of the church change his womanizing ways. It’s a kind of Game of Thrones version of the papacy, with lots of violence, as the pope dispatches goons to do away with his enemies and rivals.
7. Costa-Gavras’s Amen (2002) stirred controversy with its poster of a red cross morphing into a swastika. It tells the story of a young SS officer who is appalled when he learns that Jews are being gassed on a massive scale and tries to alert the Catholic clergy to this, but finds they are indifferent except for one young priest.
The priest, played by Mathieu Kassovitz, fights to get through to the pope, and finds himself up against church politics: the top Catholic hierarchy is more worried about Stalin, because of his atheism, than Hitler.
8. Spotlight (2015), which won the Best Picture Oscar, isn’t actually about the pope, but it is about how the archdiocese in Boston allowed pedophile priests to sexually abuse children, mostly locally but also all over America and the world. It’s told from the point of view of journalists from the Boston Globe who investigate the scandal.
It’s especially relevant today because while Pope Francis did make some changes that made it easier for priests to give evidence against their colleagues, he also refused to grant harsh sentences against many pedophile priests, including some who confessed to their crimes.
