Pilgrims In A Perilous World
Conclave, A Real Pain
 

Miles David Moore

The recent election of Pope Leo XIV was even more unexpected than the outcome of the papal election depicted in Edward Berger’s Conclave.  We will never know what backstage dramas took place to elevate Cardinal Robert Prevost, a Chicagoan who spent decades as a missionary bishop in Peru, to the papacy, when it was axiomatic that a native of the United States would never be pope. But the Oscar-winning screenplay by Peter Straughan, based on a novel by Robert Harris, gives us enticing, alarming food for speculation.

Conclave begins with a scene straight out of John Le Carre: a black-clad figure walks through dark streets and tunnels, clutching a sinister-looking briefcase.  Soon he arrives at his destination: the building where the pope lays dying.  The man is Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), dean of the College of Cardinals.  Other cardinals including Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci) and Joseph Tremblay (John Lithgow) are among those in solemn attendance.  

Lawrence and Bellini were especially close to the late pontiff and share his progressive agenda.  Bellini wants greater acceptance of LGBTQ Catholics, an expanded role for women in the Church, and “no more families of ten children because Mommy and Daddy didn’t know better.”  He disavows any ambition to be pope, but Lawrence sees him as the best bet against archconservative bully Goffredo Tedesco (Sergio Castellito).

As dean, Lawrence is in charge of organizing the conclave.  He does so with a sense of guilt: he did not part friends with the old pope, who was angered by his request to resign the deanship.  Lawrence shares with the pope a growing sense of doubt—not about God, but about the Church.

As cardinals arrive from around the world for sequestration during the voting process, Lawrence receives distressing news from Archbishop Wozniak (Jacek Koman): the pope’s last meeting was with Tremblay, another likely candidate for the papacy.  The pope dismissed Tremblay from all his ecclesiastical offices, for reasons Wozniak doesn’t know.

Events at the conclave become progressively more unsettling.  Cardinal Vincent Benitez (Carlos Diehz), whom the late pope created Archbishop of Kabul in pectore (i.e. in secret), arrives at the conclave to cast his vote. Bellini, who started out strongly in the first ballot, loses ground to Tedesco.  Conservative Nigerian Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), another strong candidate, has a public screaming match with a nun for what turn out to be disturbing reasons.  Lawrence, against his wishes, sees an insurgency in his favor among Benitez and other cardinals. 
These tangled webs roil the conclave up to the point that an act of violence occurs—one that turns the story on its ear and leads to a final twist.

The Catholic Church is the Western world’s oldest institution, and Conclave argues that consequently it is the Western world’s oldest bureaucracy, for good and ill.  All the actual business of the Church seems to take place in whispers, in darkened corridors and stairwells, in scenes reminiscent of the more hushed sequences in The Godfather.  That atmosphere, unfortunately,
is appropriate for thugs such as Tedesco and charlatans such as Tremblay, who thrive in institutional sclerosis.  But there are also men such as Lawrence, Bellini, and Benitez, who take seriously their status as men of God and never forget the needs of rank-and -file believers. 

But in the Catholic Church, the operant word for those in power is “men.”  This is particularly hard for Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini), who watches the cardinals with silent disapproval, knowing she is smarter and more capable than most of them.  Toward the end, Sister Agnes has her explosive say, unmasking one of the story’s worst scoundrels for all the assembled clueless men to hear.

Conclave immerses viewers in a world of rigid ceremony that too often masks skullduggery and double-dealing.  The cast—which won the Screen Actors Guild Best Ensemble Award—is a marvel, all actors deployed in roles that seem tailor-made for their
talents. Berger—a director who proved his visual flair in such projects as Patrick Melrose and All Quiet on the Western Front—works with cinematographer Stephane Fontaine and production designer Suzie Davies to give the film a richly foreboding look, punctuated by startling images such as the sea of white umbrellas in a rain-soaked Vatican courtyard.

In Conclave, the most admirable characters are spiritual pilgrims who seek to divine and perform God’s will in a church riddled with corruption.  David and Benji Kaplan, protagonists of Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, are also pilgrims of a sort, but not religious ones.  “There but for the grace of no God go I,” David (Eisenberg) says at one point. Instead, cousins David and Benji (Kieran Culkin) seek many things at once—reconnection with dead loved ones and each other, as well as coming to grips with family, history, and survivors’ guilt.

A Real Pain begins with David and Benji meeting at John F. Kennedy Airport to fly to Poland.  Their late grandmother left money in her will for them to make the trip; they will take a “Jewish history tour” of Warsaw, Lublin, and the former concentration camp at Majdanek, then travel to the small town where their grandmother lived to find her old house.

We see from the beginning that David and Benji are deeply neurotic, though in starkly different ways.  The tightly wound David makes repeated phone calls to Benji on the way to the airport, apologizing for being late; Benji, expansive and passionate, is the sort who thinks it’s fine to put cartons of yogurt in your pocket for safekeeping.  He’s also the sort who mails himself marijuana to his Warsaw hotel to ensure he and David have good weed in Poland.  David is proud of his job in digital ad sales; Benji’s reaction to it is, “God, I hate that shit!”

In Warsaw, David and Benji meet their tour mates: Marcia (Jennifer Grey), a woman coming off a brutal divorce; Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a Jewish convert and survivor of the Rwandan genocide; Mark (Daniel Oreskes) and Diane (Liza Sadovy), self -styled “Mayflower Jews” whose ancestors immigrated long before the Holocaust; and James (Will Sharpe), the tour guide and the only non-Jew.  It is one of the shrewdest features of Eisenberg’s excellent screenplay that we get to know these people just well enough.  They are not ciphers, but they exist largely to react to David and Benji, and their reactions tell us a great deal. 

David interacts awkwardly with his tour mates, “I know you’re not the most comfortable person with groups and people and shit,” Benji tells him.  Benji, on the other hand, quickly becomes the group’s de facto leader.  He berates James and the others about their insensitivity. “We are Jews on a train in Poland!” he rants at one point.  “Does no one see the irony here?...Eighty years ago we would have been herded into the back of this fucking thing like cattle!”  The others are disconcerted at first, but they eventually warm to Benji’s ardent nature.  At one point, Benji persuades the others to make action poses in front of a war memorial. David declines to pose and is left juggling everyone’s cell phones to take pictures.

Each cousin wishes he were more like the other. “I love him, and I hate him, and I want to kill him, and I want to be him!” David
says.  As for Benji, he tells David, “You have a wife and a job. I don’t really have anything going on.”

Essentially,A Real Pain is about two likable, deeply flawed men who have difficulty living in the world.  One is uncomfortable in
it, the other can’t find a place for himself at all.  The title is a multiple pun; both David and Benji can be a real pain, but they also feel great pain, for obvious and overwhelming reasons.   A Real Pain reminds me of Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, about two old friends reconnecting in an aura of sorrow, but A Real Pain has the added theme of the Holocaust, which underlies and poisons everything.  The tour group’s visit to Majdanek emphasizes that grief in a way you will never, and should never, forget. 

Kieran Culkin’s performance as Benji swept the last awards season and eminently deserved to, despite some formidable competition.  In some ways Culkin’s Benji is a variant on his other most famous role, as Roman Roy on Succession.  Both Benji and Roman are profane, hyperactive live wires, their manic wit masking deep insecurities.  But Benji, unlike Roman, cannot retreat into wealth and let others clean up the messes he makes.  (“Rich people are fucking idiots,” Benji says.)  What Benji could retreat into was the love of his grandmother, and without her presence, he is lost.  We ache for Benji as much as David does, and get just as exasperated with him.

By design Eisenberg’s David isn’t as dazzling a character as Benji, but Eisenberg still has many poignant moments as a man with a constant, urgent need to protect himself.  When David talks about his little son’s obsession with tall buildings, you tell he identifies with his son’s need to latch on to something solid.

No review of A Real Pain would be complete without mentioning its soundtrack.  The nocturnes and etudes of Chopin, the composer who personifies Poland, accompany David and Benji’s adventures.  In interviews, Eisenberg said he intended Chopin’s music to give a sophisticated counterpoint to its lead characters’ juvenile behavior. Personally, I see even more in Eisenberg’s choice.  I think that the melancholy inherent in Chopin’s music underscores the melancholy inherent in David and Benji’s story, and in Poland’s.  During the tour, James notes that Warsaw is often called “The Phoenix City” because it has arisen from the ashes so many times.  David and Benji’s grandmother fled the ashes, and now David and Benji are left to deal with that history as best they can.  How successful they are can be judged by Benji, whom we find at the end in exactly the same place he was at the beginning.