"Conclave" is just "Mean Girls" with priests

There can be up to 120 electors invited to participate in a papal conclave. Berger's film doesn’t specify how many are present for this one, but as the College of Cardinals’ dean, Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) assumes the task, or burden, of managing the flock.

But he really only has to watch out for the popular ones. Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), a left-leaning centrist who takes pride at being the Pope’s main confidante until the end, believes the job should be his.

His opposite, right-wing Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) is the gathering's Regina George. A flamboyant clergyman with a flair for vaping, Tedesco promises to cease “the sacrilege of relativism, placing all faiths as equal.” 

He's also a racist who recoils at the idea of a Black pope like Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), who shares Tedesco’s arrogance and homophobia – he supports imprisoning queer people and condemning them to hell. You get the sense that either man would merrily punched a subordinate in the face and expect them to think it was awesome.

Concise parallels between “Mean Girls” characters and specific cardinals can be tough to come by, but the closest thing this mess has to Lindsay Lohan's new kid Cady Heron is Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), an unexpected arrival elevated to his station by the late pope in pectore, meaning secretly. 

Cady, the protagonist of “Mean Girls,” was raised and homeschooled in Africa, lending her a whiff of exoticism compared to most of the student body at North Shore High School. (Apparently naming a country or culture instead of a whole vast continent was asking too much of Hollywood in 2004, when the original movie came out.)

Benitez is introduced as the Mexican-born archbishop of Kabul whose ministry took him to some of the most dangerous war zones on the planet. That doesn’t earn him additional respect from Tedesco or the other queen bees, who instead wonder what the Catholic church is doing in Afghanistan. Plus, the clothes he arrives in are fugly.

One would think that such a noble ecclesiastic gathering would be governed by wisdom and good sense. Certainly Lawrence’s choice, Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), believes that to be true.

The paragon of false humility, Bellini reminds everyone he really doesn’t want to be named pope . . . even as he passionately campaigns for the job. He’s only doing it for the sake of the Church’s legacy, you see. Straightaway, though, its clear he’s not even close to be a favorite; and he’s barely a dark horse. Still, he insists on browbeating  others to support a cause as lost as, well, making fetch happen.

Fiennes’ dome may be closely shorn, but his Cardinal packs plenty of blackmail material underneath his zucchetto. Lawrence professes to be above all this nonsense. “No sane man would want the papacy,” he insists.

He also believes what he’s told in response: “The men who are dangerous are the ones who do want it.”

While his main responsibility as Dean is to ensure the vote goes smoothly and by the book, Lawrence is not above manipulating politics. Lawrence enlists Monsignor O’Malley (Brían F. O’Byrne) to dig up dirt on the frontrunners, claiming that it’s simply for his edification, insisting he doesn’t want to taint the election process.

Before they cast the first vote, though, Lawrence laces their thought processes with his personal philosophy on the matter.

“There is one sin which I have come to fear above all others: certainty.”

Certainty, he continues, “is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.”

But as is the way of such men, the more doubt he has about the popular kids, the more certainty he has in his suitability to assume the mantle and mitre of Il Papa. “Hey, buddy, you're not pretending anymore. You're plastic. Cold, shiny, hard plastic.”

Along the way Lawrence also breaks the confessional sacrament’s seal of confidence to defenestrate a candidate he deems unworthy with some help from Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini), the head of the nuns assisting the conclave. Agnes recognizes Lawrence’s moves because, like him, she likes mess.

“Although we sisters are supposed to be invisible, God has nevertheless given us eyes and ears,” she announces to a roomful of cardinals during an especially brutal torpedoing session.

But Agnes is especially lethal in a scene where she simply pulls up an incriminating file on her computer, leaves it onscreen and silently darts out so Lawrence can peer at it. Why, it’s almost as if she learned the Plastics' trick of luring someone to gossip about another person on the phone without letting on that it's a three-way conference with the subject silently listening.

The papal electors self-segregate at mealtimes by sitting with their own countrymen. The exceptions are the non-European bishops because, just like in high school, the Black, Latinx and Asian kids have their own tables.

That also makes lunchtime faceplants a real danger in “Conclave,” as when a nun who wasn’t expected to be there, Sister Shanumi (Balkissa Maiga) drops a tray at the sight of someone and runs out of the room, causing a stir . . . and attracting Lawrence’s attention.

Oh, and on Wednesdays, they wear pink cardinal red.

A significant mystery in the movie involves a rumor about which the implicated party insistently claims both ignorance and innocence. Whenever there’s filthy gossip about a powerful person at a worldwide organization, there must be document.

Lawrence, with Sister Agnes playing His Girl Friday, obtains the smoking gun, gives the Vatican copy machine a workout and tosses the incendiary flyers to everybody at the lunch hall. It's a character assassination worthy of Regina George’s greatest hit.

There comes a point in “Conclave” where all hope is lost and a recurring refrain counsels the acceptance of a lesser evil. “We’ve had worse!” Bellini sighs when confronted with the prospect of a corrupt candidate winning over the needed majority.

But in their darkest hour,  when the most odious contestant seems inevitable, the Cady of the conclave asserts his presence to chastise his fellow cardinals for their pettiness. “The church is not tradition. The church is not the past,” he said. “The church is what we do next.” With that, the holy men take a collective trust fall so the healing can begin.

This isn’t exactly where “Conclave” ends. There is no egalitarian distribution of the Holy See’s power among the cardinals, no breaking apart the crown so everyone can share the honor. But its resolution matches the quotability of the rest of the movie and Tina Fey’s interpretation of “Queen Bees and Wannabees.”

"We are mortal men; we serve an ideal,” one of the cardinals says. “We cannot always be ideal." If they were, they wouldn’t be half as entertaining.