How realistic is ‘Conclave’?
So, the Pope died, and you’re wondering whether you already know everything that will happen next to pick his successor, thanks to Edward Berger’s Oscar-nominated film Conclave. In general, this type of reasoning is shaky and a bit naive. Just because you’ve seen The Brutalist doesn’t mean you should go around renovating people’s home offices. Just because you’ve seen Wicked doesn’t mean you should assume you can now defy gravity. And just because you’ve seen The Substance doesn’t mean you should stop trying to reverse the ageing process with every last penny you’ve got. Seriously, keep it up. You’re looking great.
That said, Conclave has the air of a meticulously researched period drama set in the present. Taking place just after the pope’s death, it follows the conference of cardinals, called a conclave, that meets to vote on his successor. The drama of the film hinges on the tug-of-war between the more liberal side of the Catholic church and the more conservative one, with plenty of bombshells sprinkled along the way regarding the various transgressions of certain frontrunners.
In the film, Ralph Fiennes plays Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the dean of the College of Cardinals, who the late pope instructed to facilitate the voting. He opens the proceedings with a moving homily about the importance of doubt, which is met with raised eyebrows by many of his colleagues. Because no one earns a two-thirds majority in the first round of voting, the conclave is forced to meet multiple times in the coming days to reach a consensus and issue white smoke from the chimney to signal the selection of the new pope.
We can be pretty darn sure that the cardinals currently convening in the Vatican in the aftermath of Pope Francis’s death will not decide to put a man who none of them has heard of in the church’s most senior position. That said, we shouldn’t rule out some backstabbing, subterfuge, and savvy nuns amongst the pageantry.
So, how accurate is it?
It turns out that, wild plot aberrations aside, Conclave gets a lot right. The cardinals are sequestered and prevented from speaking with anyone on the outside. They cast their votes inside the Sistine Chapel and write them on slips of paper that are burned after being counted. The guest rooms where the cardinals stay are replicas of the real thing. The rituals that take place after the pope’s death, including the sealing of his room, the destruction of his ring, and the oaths sworn by the cardinals, are all accurate.
Even small details, such as the chemicals used to ensure that black smoke billows from the chimney on the days when the vote has been unsuccessful and white when it has been successful, are true to life. There is also a scene in which the Sistine Chapel is swept for listening devices to ensure that no one is recording the proceedings, which is true to life.
Author Robert Harris, who wrote the book on which Conclave was based, did indeed do his research. He even consulted the late English cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, who took part in the 2005 and 2013 conclaves. Still, not everything is exactly right. The tables in the Sistine Chapel are positioned differently, for example, and the cardinals do not address each other the way they do in the film.
Minor quibbles aside, though, the film is remarkably accurate from a procedural standpoint. If you’re wanting to feel like a fly on the wall of the sequestered conclave, you could do a lot worse than rewatch the film, even if you have to disregard pretty much every plot development.
