I was rooting for this one pretty heavily after an alluring trailer and plenty of great reviews from people whose taste I enjoy. I mean a film about the political jostling and jousting in the midst of the secretive and mysterious institution that is the Vatican, cloaked in its opulence and surrounded by the power and absurdity of ritual and religion? -thats proverbial catnip for someone like me. But, alas that was not to be the case. From it's mechanistic, “sound the trumpets” opening - to its “did you get it?” ending, most of my issues with “Conclave” are the same I had with director Edward Bergers breakout remake of “All Quiet on the Western Front”, which could be summarized as a very acute case of "Beautiful Gowns, Beautiful Gowns". In both films there is/was an insidious stagey-ness to Bergers style, that made them confusingly sterile considering the drama and moral dilemmas on display. There are major tensions and philosophical contentions at play amongst some of the most petty, code driven, dastardly, hypocritical liars on the planet and there is no drama save for what lives in the language and what lives in the lines of these actors faces and under their tongues as they speak. How could there not be one moment where I registered any distinct emotion in a movie where “the pope is dead!” is just the beginning is a question Im still asking myself. There is a stark sense of the operatic, and the melodramatic in the films story of bitchy clergymen, in fresh fits, a mere gesture at the “Goodfellas” in smoking jackets film we could've had, but save for the acting and the words, the actual feeling of drama only comes in fits. For a movie that in actuality is frankly a bit funny, the framing and shots in this film are as quiet as a graveyard. “Tough crowd” is a line that could follow a number of sequences that failed to register what was so clearly on screen. There's one sequence during which one clergyman takes a sassy hit off his vape as another is being condemned and even then Berger seems disinterested in just how absurd a lot of this is. Even when a bomb outside explodes and sends a beam of light shining through the hole in the dome, it feels anti climactic, and very self involved, instead of something that acknowledges the grand nature of the farce and hypocrisy. It's also an angry film, but Berger hampers that too. The politics of “tolerance” are treated like precious gems newly discovered by a brilliant mind willing to sift through the veils of human ignorance when it mostly comes off as innert imagery driven by a baseline understanding of the obvious.