'Conclave' Is My New No. 1 For 2024, And A Perfect Pre-Election Movie
#295: "Conclave," "Daddio," Practical Magic," "MaXXXine"
Edition 295:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: A movie about the election of a new pope is my No. 1 movie of the year. Plus a looooong cab ride with Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson, a campy 90s Halloween movie with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, and I need you to gutcheck my instinct on a movie I saw at a premiere. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” a journalism movie with awards aspirations hits all my sweet spots.
Conclave
You may not remember this, but All Quiet On The Western Front actually won four Oscars. Still, when it was released in late 2022 there were many reasons to explain away its success: best-selling novel, war movie, etc. If you look back at what I wrote about the movie then, I loved it, but I didn’t name check director Edward Berger once.
Ladies and gentlemen, mea culpa. The reason for that movie being good seems obvious now, and it’s the same reason Conclave is my new No. 1 movie of 2024 — Berger belongs on that elite tier of filmmakers.
The impressive thing is just how different it is from his previous World War I epic. It’s a people in rooms talking movie set in one location, based on a beach read paperback about the political machinations of the Catholic church to elect a new pope. In so many other directors’ hands it could easily become cheesy, boring, or soap operatic.
But this version, with this director, is an example of B+ material at A+ execution. When we talk about “movies they don’t make anymore,” or the movies we loved from the 90s, this is what we’re talking about. Berger makes simple scenes look beautiful, he makes small moments feel huge, and he pulls the viewer on a string through the story in a way that gives a drama the propulsiveness of a thriller.
Ralph Fiennes stars as the “dean” of the college of cardinals, overseeing the election process in what is a thinly veiled metaphor for American electoral politics. There’s the conservative side and the liberal side, but the movie does a good job of complicating that enough to not make it predictable. Pretty quickly a handful of frontrunner candidates are established, including Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow, and almost like a sports movie, we see them jockey for position.
A sign of a great movie: characters who are distinct and memorable enough to be quickly identified, yet not so predictable that their next move becomes obvious.
Again, if I were to explain the plot in basic terms — they vote, they argue, they vote again — it does no justice to the level of intrigue that continues to build. Secrets are revealed, schemes are cooked up, black mail is enacted. There are several showstopping moments I will remember for a long time.
And it’s not just about who wins in the end. Through the rising action the movie builds in existential questions about the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law, tradition versus progress, faith versus doubt.
While the filmmaker’s point of view on such questions (including which direction he’s leaning in next week’s election) aren’t exactly a mystery based as the movie unfolds, he takes the plot to a really interesting place. Just when I expected it to be cynical and nihilistic, it turns to hope and (dare I say) faith in the remaining shreds of humanity. I’m not sure I have the same optimism for what might happen next Tuesday….
I’m not going to go crazy here. I gave Conclave four out of five stars on Letterboxd, and am definitely open to the idea that some other movie this fall could come in and blow it away, but for now it’s pretty comfortably at the top spot in my rankings for 2024 releases.
Go see it as soon as you can!
Something New
Daddio (Netflix): I’ll be honest I didn’t have time to watch any other new movies this week, because every night was spent watching my Dodgers win the World Series (!!!). But there was a movie that just got added to Netflix that I caught in theaters over the summer, and I was probably one of like 12 people in the country who saw it, so for all intents and purposes it’s a new release. You may see Sean Penn or Dakota Johnson in the photo and think…what’s that? Maybe I’ll watch it!
You can read my full write-up here, but this is a snippet: “It’s going to be a hard movie to recommend unless you have a lot of patience and high level of empathy, as the movie revolves entirely around the peeling back of Johnson’s character’s life like an onion, with very little in the way of universal commonality. It’s an acting showcase for the two leads, who are practically performing dialogue and monologues in a black box theater here with a single rearview mirror for a prop. But I doubt anyone will walk away strongly affected by its contents.”
Something Old
Practical Magic (1998, Max): Here’s something I learned this Halloween: there really aren’t a lot of non-scary movies out there for people who want the holiday vibe without the frights, as was the case with my friends (I believe the correct term for them is “sissies”). So we settled on this late 90s…errr, cult classic?…starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as witches who are cursed to have every man they ever fall in love with die. Although having seen the movie, I don’t really know what it’s about. The story logic is incomprehensible, and the disjointed scenes are kind of hard to follow.
With all that being said, the fall vibes are immaculate, and this movie might just have the most progressive gender politics of any mainstream 90s movie I’ve seen — the cast features meaty parts for almost a dozen women while the only men in the movie are one-dimensional love interests who fail the reverse Bechdel test. It’s pretty fun in a campy B-movie sort of way.
All that I haven’t mentioned the REAL reason to watch this movie, which is just how incredibly beautiful a young Sandra Bullock in every scene of this movie. It’s dazzling, to the point of embarrassment for her eventual love interest, who definitely doesn’t deserve her.
Something To Stream
MaXXXine (Max): I need you all to help gut check me here. You may remember I went to this movie’s premiere in June, and thought it was really good both as an homage to decades of slasher movies and a funny propulsive thriller all its own. Yes, it’s the third movie in a trilogy about doing anything to be famous (as in, murdering a bunch of people), but you don’t need to have seen X or Pearl to fully get what’s going on here. And Mia Goth proves she’s a movie star. So if you wouldn’t mind sneaking in one more night of Spooky SZN, please watch it for me and tell me if it’s actually good or if I just got swept up in the Hollywood magic??
Trailer Watch: September 5
You all know I love me a good journalism movie. This one I know must be good, because it was unheralded until people saw it at festivals and then it started getting awards buzz. It follows the television coverage of the hostage crisis at the 1972 Olympics with the verve of a tense thriller — we’re talking real Argo vibes — while giving some great behind the scenes TV studio stuff a la “The Newsroom.” I’m sold.