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Conclave is a (non-action) thriller set inside the Sistine Chapel during the election of a new pope, starring veteran acting luminaries Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow as cardinals conspiring to sit on the throne of Saint Peter while still laboring to appear less ambitious than they really are. It’s the kind of solid mid-budget drama for grown-ups that Hollywood used to make frequently, but it now seems so remarkable that it has a serious shot at winning the Best Picture Oscar.

The movie, which is primarily in English, but also in Italian, Spanish, and Latin, is a straightforward adaptation by German director Edward Berger (Deutschland 83 and the latest All Quiet on the Western Front) of Robert Harris’ 2016 novel. There was an old saying that mid-century Hollywood films were movies about Protestants made by Jews for Catholics. Conclave is a return to the brief era of films such as The Exorcist about Catholics.

A former Fleet Street journalist turned author of well-researched political fiction in the tradition of Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal), Harris has had quite a few of his upper-middlebrow page-turners filmed. Perhaps the most notable was Roman Polanski’s 2010 thriller The Ghost Writer, with Ewan McGregor as a hack hired to compose the memoirs of a former Labour prime minister (Pierce Brosnan), modeled on Harris’ ex-friend Tony Blair, who, Harris asserted, sold out the United Kingdom’s national interest to back George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Robert Harris is a sort of left-of-center English patriot in the vein of George Orwell, a notorious bigot against Irish Catholics (e.g., the final boss in 1984 is named O’Brien), but he works harder than Orwell to be sympathetic to Catholic politicians like the cardinals (although Blair’s post-office conversion to Catholicism perhaps upset Harris).

“Conclave carries on in this tradition of good-but-not-quite-great Robert Harris adaptations.”

Conclave carries on in this tradition of good-but-not-quite-great Harris adaptations. Movie versions of Harris’ books aren’t as informative as his originals, but he does provide a framework of functional plots and intelligent dialogue. And Berger has a good feel for the look of the sensible but vaguely paranoid methods that have evolved over the centuries so that nobody can tamper with your ballot for Cardinal Borgia or Cardinal Medici.

While in Rome in 2013 during the election of Pope Francis to research his fine trilogy of historical novels on Cicero’s rivalry with Julius Caesar, it occurred to Harris that the closest thing to the Roman Senate today is a papal conclave.

Personally, I like Italians more than Romans because they now occasionally feel twinges of guilt about their ruthless opportunism. Thus, in Conclave, the job of the pope seems to be to scold the cardinals that they aren’t living up to their high ideals, and the aspirant who makes the other clerics feel most ashamed wins. That seems like a moral improvement over Roman times.

Conclave opens with the death of the old pope, a Francis-like liberal.

In case you are wondering, no, none of the cardinals murdered him. Conclave is a more subtle thriller than that.

Also, unlike the 2015 Best Picture winner, the decent but undistinguished Spotlight, Harris’ story treats the Catholic priest sex abuse scandals merely in passing as yesterday’s news, one of the unfortunate events inevitable in a 2,000-year-old institution.

My view was that the entertainment industry had enough of its own problems with the sexual abuse of the young to not congratulate itself quite so heartily on exposing the Catholic Church’s troubles:

The movie and television industry’s point of view tends to be: Hey, at least we’re not the music industry.

Harris doesn’t seem to disagree. As a frequent collaborator with Polanski, who has been on the lam from prison in the United States for 47 years for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl, Harris isn’t going to cast the first stone over that.

Fiennes plays the author’s stand-in, a reasonable, left-of-center English cardinal appointed by the last pope to chair the next conclave. He would be angling for the throne himself, except he has recently come down with Doubts, and thus explains to cardinals who offer to vote for him that he lacks the “spiritual depth” to be pope.

Fiennes wishes to get Tucci’s progressive American cardinal elected, or, at worst, Lithgow’s oily Canadian moderate. A dark-horse candidate is a saintly Mexican liberation theology leftist who has been too busy building hospitals in the Congo for victims of sexual violence to have assembled a coalition in the college. (And Ingrid Bergman’s daughter, Isabella Rossellini, who is so fondly remembered from later 20th-century movies, returns as the Mother Superior who helps Fiennes uncover scandals.)

One goal of Fiennes and Tucci is to keep out the homosexual-hating African candidate (modeled on Cardinal Sarah), although the liberals feel conflicted about blocking the first black pope. Most of all, they loathe an Italian reactionary, who wants, horrors, to bring back the Latin mass.

Harris’ heroes are clearly on the side of Vatican II. When Fiennes accuses him of ambition, Tucci notes that every cardinal has already picked out the name he would be known as when pope. Fiennes’ papal name, for instance, would be John XXIV.

A reader once suggested to me that the prime mover of the vast cultural revolution of the later 1960s, which in America is often attributed to the Pill, the electric guitar, the baby boom, the Vietnam War, or the assassination of JFK, was instead Pope John XXIII’s unforced decision, at the peak of the Roman Catholic Church’s prosperity and strength, to convene a council of reform:

Ever since 1789, the West, broadly, had sought a happy medium between the poles of Revolution and Reaction, and the Catholic Church represented the latter pole. In Vatican II, the Church seemed suddenly to leave the field, or indeed, seemed to throw itself on to the other pole.

But, as usual in Harris’ tales, even the bad guys get smart things to say: The right-wing Italian villain drops by the left-wing Anglo-American heroes’ lunch table to point out to the leftist English-speaking cardinals that because not even cardinals can comfortably carry on a conversation in Latin anymore, all the tables are divided up by language, unlike in the good old days before Vatican II (rather resembling Charlton Heston’s famous anecdote about how lunch on the set of Planet of the Apes was segregated by species).

Conclave is a good movie, but the big plot twist at the ending is a groaner, way too 2013 for today’s tastes. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say: Lower your expectations.

Harris no doubt felt brilliant when he came up with his Shocking Revelation a dozen years ago. But by this point in cultural history, I’m merely reminded of Lisa Simpson’s rejoinder to gay pride paraders chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!”

“We are used to it. You do this every year.”