"Conclave" and "Here"

Quick thoughts on two more prestige pics.

I probably wasn't in the best mindset to watch "Conclave," which is about the election of a new Pope in the present day.  Ralph Fiennes stars as Cardinal Lawrence, the Dean  of the College of Cardinals, and the one in charge of running the conclave.  Among the hopefuls are the liberal Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), far right Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), popular African conservative Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), ambitious moderate Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), and an obscure newcomer, Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz).  Isabella Rossellini also plays a minor role as Sister Agnes, who heads the nuns serving the assembled cardinals.    

"Conclave" is essentially a political thriller, full of secretive conversations and new information being revealed every few minutes.  I went in expecting a more earnest depiction of the conclave process, and what I got was closer to something out of an airport paperback.  The performances are good, and director Edward Berger does a great job of putting interesting things onscreen - the Vatican pageantry is on full display - but the handling of the material felt shallow.  Actual debate over doctrine and faith are explored to some extent, but are also totally dwarfed by the scandals involving the individual cardinals, and some very high-school level factionalism.  I was especially exasperated by the very last reveal about the newly elected pope, which just felt like a needless soap opera twist for the sake of having a final punchline.

Of the excellent cast, Fiennes stands out as the good man put in the terrible position of having to ensure a fair process, despite very unfair tactics being employed on all sides, while under unimaginable pressure.  His internal journey is the most believable and affecting part of the film, particularly when has to face his own faults and ambitions.  The plot machinations are otherwise far too contrived for me to take seriously, and I find myself classifying "Conclave" with the adaptations of Dan Brown's Robert Langdon novels instead of something like "The Two Popes," which presents a far more even-handed and approachable depiction of the modern day Catholic leadership.  I don't mind some liberties being taken for the sake of entertainment - and "Conclave" is certainly entertaining - but I was hoping that this film would also be a little more grounded and sober in light of the subject matter.  

On to "Here," which I wasn't planning on writing anything about originally, until I thought about it in the context of the rest of Robert Zemeckis's career.  Zemeckis is a director whose work is marked by technical innovations, who always seems to be pushing at the limits of what filmmaking can do.  "Here" is very much a film that fits into this mindset, and is built around the gimmick of the whole narrative playing out in a single location and within the frame of a single camera shot.  We move backwards and forwards in time, watching the lives of multiple families playing out, because the imaginary camera happens to look in on the living room of a house somewhere on the East Coast.  Occasionally, floating rectangular inset panels will change only parts of the frame, so we can see multiple points in time simultaneously.  

There's a ton of other effects work involved here, including many instances of digital de-aging, face swapping, CGI backgrounds, animation, and more.  The timeline of "Here" covers everything from the dinosaurs to the present day, but is primarily about the life of Richard Young (Tom Hanks), his parents Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly), and his wife Margaret (Robin Wright).  Other people who inhabit the same house include an aviator in the 1900s, an inventor in the 1940s, and an African-American family in the COVID era, who we get glimpses of in counterpoint to the Youngs' story.  Richard and Margaret live out an eventful, but fairly typical suburban American life, full of disappointments and setbacks, but also many small joys and important milestones.  The de-aging work is pretty seamless, and it's fun to watch the various scene transitions play out.  

The narrative, however, never struck me as more than an interesting formal experiment.  Most of the heavy lifting of creating the film's visual language was already done by Richard McGuire, whose comic "Here" provided the source material for the film.  The script by Zemeckis and Eric Roth is well-intentioned, but very narrow in scope and too sentimental for my tastes.  All the men are frustrated dreamers of one kind or another, and nearly all the women are unhappy.  There's some humor and some subversiveness here and there - the kids are allowed to be real brats - but I was mostly reminded of Zemeckis' work on "Forrest Gump," and not in a good way.

The innovation is admirable, and I hope it wins a lot of tech awards, but "Here" isn't where I'll be returning anytime soon.

  

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