Though it only, and deservedly, received an Oscar for best adapted screenplay at the most recent Academy Awards ceremony, Edward Berger’s film version of Robert Harris’s bestseller, scripted by Peter Straughan, would have likely walked away with the lion’s share of statues had it come out, say, more than 30 years ago. This lush production about the Vatican’s College of Cardinals electing a new pope, featuring a stellar cast of well-known male actors, not to mention Isabella Rossellini, is what used to be known as a “prestige picture”: a movie on a serious subject presented seriously and in effortless good taste. However, it isn’t as self-consciously dull as some Oscar-winning prestige pictures (I’m looking at you, A Man for All Seasons), even if there’s a certain staid propriety in the mounting of the story that almost works against Harris’s pointed displays of transgressive mischief.

Ralph Fiennes plays to his peculiar strengths as Cardinal Lawrence, the dean of the congress whose job it is to manage the conclave, which suits him fine as he is currently struggling with a crisis of faith that makes the task at hand all the more usefully distracting. The main candidates are split cleanly along ideological lines between political progressives and social conservatives—the main villain of the story, Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), wants the Church to return to the Latin Mass. The initial favorite on the liberal side, the voluble American, Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), confides in Lawrence that he doesn’t want the gig at all (“it’s such a huge burden”), but feels he has to put up a fight to prevent Tedesco from prevailing, which would be a disaster, not only for the Church but for the world. In fact, during one of the ballots, St. Peter’s is attacked by a suicide bomber, causing Tedesco to double down on his pledge to publicly demonize Islam, a rather prescient threat, since an unexpected contender for the piscatory ring is Benitez (Carlos Diehz), the relatively young Spanish priest who was mysteriously elevated to the position of Cardinal of Kabul only a year earlier, and who, in the wake of several shocking revelations, including the intelligence that another front-runner, Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), bought votes on order from the late Holy Father, becomes the spoiler that both Tedesco and Bellini—newly fired up with unbecoming ambition—have to beat. 

At times, Berger’s insistence on filling the story with as many cultural anachronisms as he can shake a miter at becomes oppressively busy, but the suspenseful touches are all the more appealing due to how carefully Harris has worked them into proceedings that are set in stone. This aspect provides pleasure in the opportunity to watch not only supposedly pious men grapple with impulses they’d prefer to hide from mere mortals (most notably one another), but also the spectacle of a hidebound institution entering a new millennium with all its bright red cassocks in panicked disarray. 

In English and Italian. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024). 

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