Back in the 1990s, before time properly began, I remember watching, on the telly, a sympathetic, intelligent young priest complaining about a new TV series called Father Ted. He wasn’t so much worried about the clerics being fecking eejits. I don’t remember him fretting about Fr Jack drinking battery acid. The main issue was that they seemed to have nothing to do all day. They wiled away the hours eating Jaffa cakes and staring out of the window. They didn’t matter.
This came back into my head as I read Megyn Kelly’s recent spittle-flecked rant about Conclave, Edward Berger’s fine pope-picking thriller. (We here warn that this column will contain serious spoilers.) The conservative US journo, currently audible on her Sirius XM show, described Conclave, winner of the Golden Globe for best screenplay, as “the most disgusting anti-Catholic film I have seen in a long time”. She had something to say about the cardinals, played by the likes of Ralph Fiennes and John Lithgow, all being “morally bankrupt/repulsive”. But her most heated ire was reserved for the twist ending. (Look, we did warn you.)
“They made THE POPE INTERSEX!” Kelly barked. This does read like the sort of woke-gone-mad overreach that falls apart upon gentle examination, but, no, Kelly does indeed describe the situation accurately. In the closing act, a hitherto unpromising candidate, after winning the vote as rank outsider, tells Cardinal Ralph that he was born with both male and female organs. He (or they) should thus be ineligible for the papacy. Fiennes’s cool political operator allows, in Kelly’s words, “said intersex person to become pope without telling anybody”.
Peter Straughan, the screenwriter, felt moved to defend himself. “I don’t think the film is anti-Catholic,” he told Variety. “I think the core message of Conclave is about the church always having to re-find its spiritual core because it deals so much with power.”
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Kelly wasn’t having it.
“I don’t believe that at all,” she responded. “It was an attempt to embarrass and humiliate Catholics.”
One unhappy truth is unavoidable. Kelly is here a winner. In recent months the Irish-American Midwesterner, who came to fame on Fox News 20 years ago, has, hitherto at the sedate end of the conservative spectrum, been cultivating an image as a finger-waving fulminator. Her rant on Taylor Swift’s gentle endorsement of Kamala Harris was a case in point. “No one gives two sh*ts about your political opinion, so you should take it and stuff it,” she said on Instagram. Ooo! What would the nuns have made of that?
Oscar season is always a good time to gather peasants with burning torches and march towards some metaphorical Castle Frankenstein. Elsewhere, absurd efforts to label Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a near-certain best-picture nominee, and Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5, hovering in the Oscar penumbra, as “Zionist propaganda” are failing to gain headlines away from social media. The many people who hate Emilia Pérez – on both left and right – have failed to stop that film’s triumphant march from ceremony to ceremony. Kelly’s attacks on Conclave aren’t going to harm its chances either. But they have gained her coverage from Variety, the Daily Mail, the New York Post and, well, this column. That is a win.
[ Conclave book review: Robert Harris out-camps Dan BrownOpens in new window ]
[ Emilia Pérez review: Bold, brassy, groundbreaking entertainmentOpens in new window ]
For what? Is there anything here to shame the Catholic Church? The titular conclave is, indeed, a maelstrom of intrigue and cynical gamesmanship. What else would you expect from a political institution? Robert Harris, author of the source novel, sent a copy to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who had acted as an adviser, and received a reply confirming, “This is exactly what a conclave is like. Your central cardinal is exactly as we cardinals would wish to be.” The English cleric, who died in 2017, was tolerant even of the twist. “As for the ending, I told myself it was only a novel,” he wrote to Harris.
Even if that were not the case, Conclave, like The Exorcist half a century ago, would still have done one big favour for the church. Think back to that priest worrying about Frs Dougal and Ted having nothing to do with their afternoon. The Exorcist, tellingly not banned in an Ireland that then banned everything, told viewers that the church was here to save the world from the greatest imaginable evils. Nobody else will help the mother of a possessed child. The priests are intelligent, brave and even a little glamorous. The film told an increasingly secular world that this ancient institution still mattered.
Conclave does the same. A film about the mechanism by which a pope is selected has taken $60 million and is set to secure a hatful of Oscar nominations. Hollywood has done the church few such solids since Bing Crosby warbled toora-loora-loo to Barry Fitzgerald.
