EPISODE 281: Conclave and Teri Garr
We recorded this episode on Monday, November 5th, right before the U.S. Presidential Election Dear Listeners, yet, rather than seeming dated, it feels more timely than ever as we navigate choppy waters ahead. In this episode Jett and Gareth both revel in Conclave, a high-end, well-produced slice of the best cheese one can enjoy, that, interestingly, shows a potential way forward towards a more just and compassionate world, and reminisce about the wonderful performances of the late, (though still with us), Teri Garr. Along the way something near-miraculous happens to Jett at a screening. Enjoy.
-
The Film Talk is brought to you by you folks who listen and help out. Just go to patreon.com/thefilmtalk for details. Now on with the show.
Oh my goodness, friends, listeners, because you all are friends.
You're all friends to us.
Countrymen, country people.
Has there been a film more designed to be talked about on the Film Talk than the new Agatha Christie thriller, Murder on Conclave, Murder on the Conclave Express? I cannot wait to talk about this astounding film, astounding for many reasons.
It's gonna be a big reveal later on the show about something that happened to me while I was watching the film, dear listeners. Folks, welcome to TheFilmTalk. I'm Jett Loe.
I'm Gareth Higgins.
The conversation never ends. And I'm excited to talk about this film, Conclave. Edward Berger or Berger, I don't know how you pronounce this.
Forgive me.
Director of the recent version of All Quiet on the Western Front has made an adaptation of Robert Harris' novel that I guess you could call a cloak and dagger novel, although there's no daggers, there are some cloaks set in the Vatican when an
elderly Pope has died and the Conclave of the Cardinals has been convened, lots of Cs in that sentence. They've been put into, I don't know, do they call it quarantine, isolation? Hived off, hived off from the rest of the world.
They're sequestered, sequestered, yes. To deliberate, to discern, to vote on papal succession. And in this film, you've got your Ralph Fiennes as a referee.
You've got John Lithgow as someone-
In the John Lithgow role.
In the John Lithgow role. And what a role that is. You've got Stanley Tucci as Aldo, best friend to the referee and a bit of a ruminator, a bit of a ruminator.
You have Isabella Rossellini as the answer. And you really have an enormous cast of people often wearing these long red robes, having serious conversations in what I'm happy to say upfront is one of the most sheerly entertaining films of the year.
And disguised within that entertainment is something genuinely profound.
That's right.
And I believe we have a clip.
We do have a clip, dear listeners. By the way, Gareth, you know, I've only said this a few times in our 16, 18, 25 year history of the show, Gareth is completely correct. This film is so entertaining.
While watching it, I was literally saying to myself throughout, silently, not out loud, it's kind of a packed audience. This is really entertaining in a way that films used to be. And we can talk about that.
This is an old fashioned movie. It's a movie for adults who remember when films were a big thing. We got a clip here.
We got Stanley Tucci and Ray Fiennes. They're outside. They're both Cardinals.
They're outside. Kind of a sepulchral. Is that a word?
Sepulchral?
You've just coined it. You've just coined it. This film is about change and newness and acceptance of new things.
So please make it sepulchral.
Yes. They're in a dark room outside, sealed by a wax seal and red ribbons sealed outside the death room of the Pope. It's lit by votive candles.
Beautiful cinematography in this film. I'll talk about that later. We got this clip and they're discussing what they have to do to elect a new Pope.
And listen to this clip, dear listeners, and I want you to think of your comfort food. Do you have something like maybe it's a ham sandwich with a lot of cheese?
Because let's be honest here, this is an entertaining film, but boy, there's a lot of cheese in this bad boy Robert Harris writes the Thinking Person's Airport Thriller and that's what this is.
Let's listen to Tucci and Fiennes, Fiennes and Tucci, as they talk about the stakes and how to elect a new Pope.
I thought we had your support. If we liberals are not united, Tedesco will become Pope. You have no idea how bad it became, Thomas.
The way he in a circle attacked the Holy Father towards the end. The smears, the leaks to the press, it was savage. He fought him every single day of his pontificate.
And now that he's dead, he wants to destroy his life's work. If Tedesco becomes Pope, he will undo 60 years of progress. You talk as if you're the only alternative, but Adyemi has the wind behind him.
Adyemi? Adyemi, the man who believes that homosexuals should be sent to prison in this world and hell in the next. Adyemi's not the answer to anything, and you know it.
If you want to defeat Tedesco...
This is a conclave, Aldo, it's not a war.
It is a war, and you have to commit to a side.
And that was Conclave, which in addition to the actors we've already named, I mean, it really does have an extraordinary cast. Sergio Castellito, Lucian Mazzamati, and an actor I'd never seen before called Carlos Diaz.
I hope I'm pronouncing their name correctly. And I do want to say up front for Jett and I to be able to talk about this film meaningfully, there's going to be spoilers and we both, I think we could say loved this film.
We haven't talked to each other yet. We're not sure if we loved it for the same reasons. Jett has teased on The Film Talk's Facebook site that something profound happened to him during the film.
He has not yet told me what that was. But we want to say to you, dear listener, the film is so enjoyable and so surprising in terms of some elements of its plot.
We would like you to go see it and press pause in about seven seconds and not listen to any more of this conversation.
Do not listen to us.
Until you've been to see it. And we'll be here when you get back. So let's just pause here and hope you go and enjoy the movie wherever you go to see it.
And we will see you when you return.
Okay. And hopefully the listener, dear listener out there has seen Conclave and enjoyed it. And now we're back.
Gareth, take it away.
Back indeed. Okay. So this film, for me, is 50 percent seven days in May.
It's 40 percent The Godfather Part 3 in the Vatican sections and it's 10 percent John Waters' Air Spray. And I mean that all as an absolute compliment, as we've already mentioned. It's a crowd-pleaser.
Well, you used to call it a crowd-pleaser. But not in the same way that True Lies is a crowd-pleaser. It's a crowd-pleaser.
Well, I kind of wish Tom Arnold was one of the Cardinals.
But we can talk. Hey, can we just mention very, very briefly? Yes.
I miss Art Malik.
I miss Art Malik.
We all do. Is he still with us?
He's around. Yes, he's in Disclaimer, Alfonso Cuarón's new show on Apple TV.
Awesome. Here's the thing about the castings. I knew nothing about this film, Gareth, you're a listener.
I go in cold. I had no idea who was in it. I'm like, what?
Isabella Rossellini? Ray Fiennes, Tucci, Lithgow, and then the great thing about Tucci, Lithgow, and Fiennes is, remember that Denny Boyle stage production of Frankenstein? Yes.
You had Benedict Cumberbatch.
You see where I'm going here with this? James McAvoy. Was it James McAvoy?
No, it was the other guy.
It was Benedict Cumberbatch and the guy from Trainspotting.
Oh, Johnny.
Yeah, that guy. Here's the thing. On alternate nights-
Johnny who used to be married to Angelina Jolie.
I beat you.
Why am I not remembering this guy?
We're getting older.
But here's the thing. Here's my point. One plays Frankenstein, the other plays Frankenstein's Monster.
They would alternate roles. So one night, Cumberbatch and Frankenstein, Johnny Lee Miller. One day it would be Cumberbatch, and then it would be Frankenstein, and the next day it would be Johnny Lee Miller.
That's how I feel about Conclave. Vines, Tucci, and Lithgow could all play the other parts.
You did mention Isabella Rossellini in the same breath, and I'm not sure that it would work if Isabella was playing-
Well, it kind of did though, didn't it?
All those spoilers. Spoilers. It kind of did.
Well, even that, by the way, my understanding is that Ralph Richardson and John Yielgud used to do the same as Johnny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch when they were in Othello together, that they would alternate roles-
Iago.
From night to night. And I think some actors have done the same thing. Maybe John C.
Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman did it in Sam Shepard's True West.
They did. They absolutely did do it in True West.
And that can sound like a gimmick, but the point is that all of these actors are so good, that you can completely see Tucci with the sensitive side doing the Ralph Fiennes role or Liz Scott would have been amazing. Liz Scott would have been amazing.
It's funny. I don't know because I felt that it's such an A team here of actors. And again, it includes the three who are not very well known, certainly not very well known internationally.
And they're at the top of their game. Yes. And yet, to me, Ralph Fiennes really is the standout.
And I couldn't imagine anybody else playing that role.
Well, he's our protagonist, though. So we start the film looking at the back of his head and we follow him in. So we are him.
Correct. So you've seen Enter the Void, where you go into the back of the head of the protagonist.
This is a more pleasant experience than that and has something more life-affirming to say. And what's so lovely about this film? You've said that it's cheese, but it is the highest class cheese.
It is a charcuterie board. And what you find when you're sampling this is there is a whole lot going on under the surface. That's genuinely profound around two particular questions.
And they're both referred to explicitly in the film. This film has two sermons. And as you know, I'm married to a clergy person, I'm married to a minister.
And one of the things that Brian is always looking for, and I'm always looking for in cinema and TV portrayals of religion is something even just half plausible. Half plausible would be good.
It's rare that there's a portrayal of a clergy person that actually feels like a real clergy person. Often they're either portrayed as ethereal, their feet really aren't on the ground, or they don't actually have a real life.
It's pretty rare to see a clergy person who's experiencing their ministry as a vocation and a calling. I don't want to call it the flaws, but just call it the full circle experience of being a human show up in that world.
I'll give you a negative example and a positive example.
Negative example, opening scene, I think I've mentioned this before in the show, opening scene of Michael Cimino's film Thunderbolt and Lightfoot has Clint Eastwood pretending to be a pastor in a country church, but he's dressed in black clergy and
he wears a ministry collar, which absolutely is not a function of independent country churches in the United States. It's just, it would be like saying that the Empire State Building is in Paris, you know, it's just so far outside.
I don't think, yes, they didn't care. And Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is not a film dedicated to versatility.
This is true. This is true.
On the other hand, the Catherine Hand character in the TV show Transparent is, was one of the most realistic, credible portrayals of a rabbi I'd ever seen, precisely because she was shown to have a daily life in addition to the sermons she preaches,
the kind of, let's call it the kind of technical pastoral work she does, she has wants, she makes mistakes, she has needs. I believed about the Cardinals in this film, that they were real people. They weren't feet fully off the ground.
I mean, they're living in this totally elevated context and they are, as you say, sequestered, quarantined from the rest of the world.
But the needs of the world are right there in the room with them, not just when the windows break as a result of a terrorist bomb, but the two sermons that get preached in this film. The first one about certainty is the enemy of faith.
The second one about the whole freaking point of ministry, of service, of community is to teach people and to embody and learn together how to love your neighbor as yourself.
That if there's a God or even if there isn't a kind of an animating divine force outside humanity or embodied deeply within humanity, the evolution of the human brain and of community teaches us to hold our absolutism very, very loosely.
And you know authority when you see it. That's all I'll say for now about this delightful charcuterie board that's a lot deeper than it might sound if we just called it a high class piece of cheese.
Well, I think what you're saying is like, what if the Da Vinci Code, but good?
We it's it's more than that.
It's more than that. No, but here's the here's the thing.
Well, I like it. Oh, it's funny. I like the Da Vinci Code and what the Da Vinci Code is trying to say about women is actually very similar to what Conclave is trying to say about who's in and who's out.
Great, great double bill.
Yeah, this film makes it wears everything on its sleeve. It's very explicit.
But in a way that again, why is the film pleasurable and why I think the listeners who love movies and know a little bit about the history of movies and know how films work with film grammar and what have you, while they'll find it pleasurable, is
because it uses traditional film grammar to make explicit the themes that you're talking about. So you alluded to, oh yeah, there's a bomb goes off and the shaft of light comes in, windows break. This has happened, because why does this happen?
The terrorist set off a bomb. No, it happens because Ray Fiennes gives in to vanity and temptation and writes his own name on a slip of paper. And as soon as he puts in his vote for himself, then as if from the heavens, God comes down.
And that is so ridiculous, but it's wonderful because in the context of the film, because the film starts off, I mentioned, Enter the Void, the shots of the back of the head of Ray Fiennes, the film starts off saying, this film is going to use
traditional film grammar to escalate and demonstrate the relationships between the characters, and we're going to love doing it. The cinematography, you might say, is heavy handed, is over the top, but it's also beautiful.
You know, in my day job here, when I'm not on The Film Talk, though really, isn't The Film Talk my life?
You're a secretly appointed Archbishop, yes?
It's, I mean, it's possible. It's possible. There's many secrets, many secrets, many of them in Latin.
Improctori?
Is that what it's called?
That's what my doctor told me I need to do. You know, I'm getting older. So the thing, here's my point.
So I do, I edit video, I shoot video during the day.
And now we have modern tools, you know, they were sort of brought about by the Coen brothers, O Brother, Warratha, where we're going to scan in the film and then we'll digitally color correct, not just color correct, but digitally grade it to give it
a certain look. And if you watch O Brother, Warratha, now it's groundbreaking and stay, it does come across kind of heavy handed, with the color grading.
But my point is, ever since we were able to put the film into the digital realm, it's easier and less time consuming to do sort of post production cinematography.
So one of the things that people can do and they do this all the time, you're doing low budget productions, is you can mask off the figures.
By mask off, I mean you've got somebody in the foreground that's your protagonist or someone that's the center of the scene, you can change their exposure levels separate from the background to give them more prominence.
In the old days, like your Gordon Willis, maybe everything would be black and the Las Vegas house at Godfather 2 and might be a little ray of light. Now you can also do that in post.
And it looked to me, at least the version that I saw, projected digitally, of course, when I saw Conclave, that they were doing this to an extent that most modern films wouldn't have.
And they were doing it, you could be argued heavy-handedly, but it worked.
Yeah, there's a fine line between heavy-handed and elegant, and I think it's on just on the right side of elegant.
It's just on, you're absolutely right, it's just on that side of elegant, and it really works. So at the end of the film, in a scene that's analogous to Ray Fiennes gives into temptation, Vanity, God, explosion, comes down.
I absolutely didn't read that scene that way, by the way, but that's all right.
Well, you know you're wrong.
So the film doesn't, the cosmology of the film doesn't believe in that kind of God.
You have a good heart. Well, but it's based on a Robert Harris book. So folks know Robert, this is airport thrillers, and they're great.
You know, Fatherland, the counterfactual one, the Nazis won the war.
I hope he wrote Enigma.
He wrote Enigma, Fatherland, Archangel, but who? Stalin, Stalin, I will give away spoilers.
He wrote a book called OO Stalin, Stalin.
That's the musical version. It's a nudie cutie.
I think Richard Attenborough directed that in 1968 with Michael Crawford.
From the producers of Ocal, Calcutta. I disagree with you about that. I mean, again, that's one of the things that made me laugh out loud.
Let's not hold our certainty too deeply.
Let's talk about the homily in a second.
Because at the end of the film, what happens? He rescues a turtle. These turtles that get out, and they're very smart, but they get out and they get killed, run over.
So as soon as he places a turtle back in its pool, that's when he hears the crowd outside cheer. Yeah. Right?
So this gives evidence of what I'm saying. It's not subtle, but that's okay because it's telling you right from the start it's not subtle. It's saying luxuriate in the old-fashioned filmmaking.
Can I just talk to, I just mentioned, because I did mention on social media that I had this experience.
Something you said, almost profound. What's the difference between almost profound and actually profound?
It's a fine line. Like between over the top and elegance.
I'm not sure I want to get into the politics, but there was a US. American elected representative who referred to a terrible event that happened earlier in the summer in which somebody nearly died. And as a semi-miraculous event.
And when I read that, I thought, this person is completely sincere. And they're acting in good faith. And they're talking about an event that was traumatic for them as an observer to it.
And it was, it brought into sharp relief the superficiality of theological discourse and of kind of metaphysical discourse that happens in the world. He's reaching for language.
To me, it felt a little bit like an inverted echo of a thing that you were saying to me nearly 20 years ago about the reason why there's conspiracy, and I want to get back to your profound thing. Near profound.
The reason there's conspiracy theories about 9-11 are because it is more terrifying for many people to live with the horror that it just took 19 guys to hijack a plane. There's no individual in charge.
There's no system in charge, or at least the systems that say they're in charge are not as in charge as they would like to think, or they would like us to think.
This guy was acting in good face, talking about a traumatic event, and I was like, man, I'd like to have a conversation with you about what's the difference between a semi-miraculous event and a miraculous event, and what is it you really need to
It seems to me what you're talking about.
It's in the mind of the person. It's how they experience it. There's a great German film about a real life possession, exorcism.
Do you know what I'm talking about? Maybe it's in the last 20 years. A woman gets possessed or her family thinks she's possessed and she has to be exorcised.
Gosh, folks, one of our listeners will know what it is. There's a scene in that film in which her family's around her, maybe there's a priest trying to get the demon out of her.
No, by the way, the film is not saying there is a demon, this is someone else perhaps dealing with mental illness. And the boyfriend of the woman...
You're talking about The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which is an American film based on something that happened in Germany.
Okay, possibly, it's quite possible.
There's a great scene in which, maybe we talked about it on our old show, in which the boyfriend is watching The Exorcism and he's just, he's in horror, he can't believe these people are buying into it, or believe these things.
Much like people can't believe that someone thinks that Christ pushed a bullet an inch away so that Donald Trump wasn't shot. But the thing is, watching that scene, it does so well is that it makes clear that for the family, this is real.
So for them, it is miraculous. They're in that realm of wonder because that is the system in which they live.
They're ensconced in that system of the miraculous, just as the person who would believe that there is a divine force that saved Donald Trump. We can talk about the miraculous. We can talk about-
So what was your almost profound experience?
What do you think it was?
That's a big question.
Well, I wondered if it would- Well, you did say to me that you wished you hadn't predicted the twist early on because I think that you were indicating you would have enjoyed the film more.
I've seen a lot of movies and if you have, there's two twists, there's a twist which everybody will see coming and it's such an obvious twist that you'll think, oh, they're not really going to do that.
And what I'm talking about again, spoilers, is that the cardinal from-
The Mexican cardinal who's the Archbishop of Kabul.
He'll become the Pope, right? So that's the first. The second twist is that he-
That he's intersex.
He's intersex, yeah.
And I wish I had not guessed those right away.
Interesting. There's at least two other twists.
It's Agatha Christie.
And I think one of them is more credible than the other. I think-
It's proud, please.
Well, the lovely scene when Aldo asks Dean Lawrence, what name would you take if you were Pope? And Ray Fiennes has a name right there ready and waiting. And you realize all along, he hasn't been angling for the position, but he's just being honest.
Of course, I'd like to be Pope. I did think that the kind of going into the Pope's chamber and finding the document embedded in the bedpost.
I need to see the film again because to me, it looked like just too much of a deus ex machina that like, oh, he just happens to see that there.
However, it's in alignment with what we might assume to have been the deceased Pope's beliefs about certainty. Because it turns out the deceased Pope has been engineering all of this from beyond the grave.
Like he set it all up to be the best he could to achieve the outcome that he wanted. But he also would have had to have acted in faith and knowing the possibility that it might not work.
It's like those, again, airport thrillers in which like a software engineer, coder, brilliant like a character has died and then his machine is living on and it's setting traps.
Watching the film in which he discovers the documents, that to me was surprising because I thought, well, that's so weak.
Then it made me think because I did have to, just like Civil War, like we talked about in the film Civil War, how did the critics miss it? Maybe all the critics were gone.
During the scene in which the reasons for the war explained in Civil War, I did go ahead and get a diet Pepsi. Did I miss the scene?
Because I thought when he went in to the Pope's bedroom where he died, that the clue that would lead him to finding the document would be something to do with the tailoring of the people garments, because that is explicitly said about, oh, he was the
weight problem, so things had to be let out. And so I wonder, did they change that, or am I missing something? Because that was the, you know, not a red hair, that was not set up. So I think something happened there.
Maybe there's a listener out there who couldn't-
And maybe it'll feel different the next time. So what was the almost profound-
Oh, okay. So there's the homily, talk about the two sermons, the homily that Ray Finds gives. And I want to say something to you, Gareth, and I want to say something to the listener.
I know I come across as flippant, and I often am, and I use humor as a device. It helps deal with pain, and we can talk about the origins of comedy and what have you.
So I want to be very clear that I am not doing saying what I'm about to say as a joke. I am completely serious.
And even though I'm also going to talk about how I responded to what happened to be during the screening, you might think that is, I don't want to say sacrilegious or so. I don't want to insult anyone's faith.
As listeners know, probably long-time listeners, I am a man of no faith. I was raised with no faith at all. Never went to church, nothing.
You were luxuriated. I don't know if that's the right word. You were inculcated.
I'm a man of too much religion.
You got a lot in there.
You got a lot of religion. You're married to a pastor.
I'll share it with you. I'm willing to share it with you.
Married to a pastor. So I'm a person, the closest I would say come to faith is that, oh, I would say, well, mystery. Everything is a mystery.
I could take comfort in the unknowable. We think about what are some of the functions of religion. Obviously, the fear of death, we would try to find meaning.
There's that great line in Forbidden Planet. Leslie Nielsen says, we're the mindless primitive, that's why we invented laws and that's why we have laws in religion.
Are you attempting to bring up Forbidden Planet in every episode?
Absolutely. Love that film.
Good.
The Beep to Boops.
Beep to boop.
That's a deep cut from a previous episode.
The listener.
Mystery. Well, mystery because, and again, I'm going to sound flipping it. I don't want folks to know that I'm serious here.
If I look at a dog, you could have the smartest dog in the world. Doesn't matter how smart the dog is, you can't teach this dog calculus. It doesn't matter.
We were evolved to live in this system. We evolved on planet Earth. There's things that are innately, by their very nature, going to be beyond us.
We cannot apprehend our reality. That's sort of my feeling. I'm not going to say faith.
Okay. So I'm a person of no faith, right? No belief in God, any religion that I've ever heard of.
Nothing. It's not in me. But when Ray Fiennes gives his homily, they're going to start voting, gives his homily to all the Cardinals.
He says, from the script, if there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery and therefore no need for faith.
As he was speaking, Gareth, you're listeners, what I can only imagine people of faith feel, I felt the eminent presence coming rushing towards me of what I could would only term God and the connection to all things.
And I realized in that moment, if I don't stop this, if I don't fight it right now, I'm going to become some sort of person of faith. It's going to happen. I could feel it.
I was seconds away from believing in what I can only say God and a connection of all things. I'm completely serious. Flash Gordon, Topol in Flash Gordon.
Me and the Merciless tries to program, uses his henchmen played by, was it Peter? Who's the actor? The English actor, Peter?
Oh, Peter Wingard.
Peter Wingard.
They're going to program his mind. They're going to zap everything out of his mind.
They put a zappy thing on him.
They put a long thing, looks kind of like the laser gun from Goldfinger when they're about to zap Sean Connery. They're going to reprogram his mind. And we see Dr.
Zarkoff losing all of his mind, losing himself so he could be a minion of me. And later on, it turns out, no, he's okay. And they asked him, how did you do it?
He fought back. And dear listener, I don't want to offend you if you are a person of faith, a deep faith like Gareth.
I fought back in that moment from feeling the presence of God and getting into a place of faith and love and gratitude for all things in humanity.
Why?
I don't know. Why? That's the topic for another...
This is the prologue. I think that's the topic for the episode of Conclave. I haven't paused.
Now, to be fair...
That's not a criticism. That's a genuine curiosity.
That's a big question. To be fair, dear listeners, Gareth knows this. I had just broken my rib a couple of days previously, and the pain was so great that they did prescribe oxycodone, also known as oxycontin.
And it's possible that like Philip K. Dick, who had that wisdom teeth, he has wisdom teeth, he's taken out his heavily on drugs, and then he had the experience of the vast active living system, the valus, and it's possible that was affected.
Again, see, I'm being flippant. It sounds flippant by saying it, but I'm just putting that out there.
Well.
But the film, my point here is the film, even though it is a slice of cheese, and it is a pure entertainment, there is the profundity in its bones that could affect even someone as slightly cynical and without faith as myself.
Does that make any sense, Gareth?
It does make sense. There's plenty of cynicism in the religious world as well. And to your point about the medications that you were on for your very painful ribbon.
Dear listener, please send thoughts of love and warmth and dare I say, healing to Jett because he's pretty banged up. And he's doing the show, I wouldn't say under duress, but in physical discomfort.
One thought, not to get into a big theological debate about it, one thought that was intriguing to me in my early days of thinking about faith was, well, what if God made the drugs?
So what if there's no possibility of spiraling so far out that we get bigger than the truth? I don't particularly think that a God worthy of the name is particularly concerned about you having the right doctrines or the right beliefs.
I think something so lovely about this film is people of faith shouldn't be offended by it. We'll actually likely feel affirmed by it. People who are not people of faith, and I don't like that term because that can sound like there's a hierarchy.
People who don't have religious faith could also feel touched and moved by what the film is saying about human beings.
Something that I find so moving and so rare about this film is, there aren't really bad guys in it, but if you were to name potential villains of the piece, Lowercase V, it's the Italian Cardinal, Tedesco, who's, you know, anti, he's basically a
separatist. He's a separatist and he's authoritarian. And Lithgow's character, who is, by all, you know, by all, as far as we can tell, he's kind of got liberal social ideas, but he's still manipulating things from behind the scenes.
He's still someone who's not trustable. And the Nigerian archbishop played by Lucian Mzimati is portrayed as homophobic, but we don't actually see much else about what he thinks about the world.
One could imagine that he's actually on the side of the economically poor.
The film doesn't get into the whole question of why, what we might call socially conservative or reactionary theology took root, particularly in Africa, as a result of colonial religion.
But the scene where Dean Lawrence approaches Archbishop Cardinal Adeyemi and tells him, I'm going to maintain the sanctity of the confessional. And effectively, you need to consider your position.
That is threading an ethical needle in a beautiful way. And the response of the Nigerian Archbishop by breaking down in tears and asking him to pray with him.
If you step back from that and you were to make an analogy between the theological positions of these two people and electoral political positions, particularly in the US, we're recording this the day before the presidential election.
These two people are about as far away as it's possible to get from each other on the theological scale. And they're sitting effectively holding hands on a bedside, one of them trying to comfort the other.
So this movie has conservative bad guys and progressive bad guys. Its position is firmly on the side of the expansion of the vision of love and the inclusion of more people at the center.
Isabella Rossellini's character is like absolutely making a case for women priests. And she's not making a case that women should be allowed to be priests. She's making a case that women are already priests.
In the same way that if you look at the history of the sociology of health in the UK, there was a lot of work done on to this in the past that showed that nurses who tended to be women, just because of the patriarchal system, and doctors who tended
to be men, often find themselves in situations where a nurse that had been a nurse for 20 years, clearly knew more about medicine than a doctor who'd only been a doctor for two years. And then sometimes nurses wouldn't speak up when they saw a doctor
about to make a terrible decision because of frankly misogyny and patriarchy. This scene just kind of shatters that.
And I just, I simply wanted to name, the film has goodness in everybody, and frankly is inviting everybody in the audience to recognize the goodness in everybody.
And that the only, it's a necessary step on that path to give up your certainty about your certainty.
Well, and the certainty about yourself too. And we can think of the certainty in the self as being analogous to the movie tropes. So even the good actors we think are righteous or above it all like Ray Fiennes.
As you say, oh, it turns out he did have his pope name ready.
Aldo Bellini played by Stanley Tucci, thinks this guy is a righteous fighter for progressive causes, and then it's revealed, oh, in a throwaway line by Fiennes, well, what did he give you, that he probably took something.
There was a quid pro quo so that he would get behind Lithgow once he realized that that was the smart political movie. Oh, I'll go, you know, that he's just has just the same level.
If you want to use the word corruption, he might use a different word. He's like perhaps more living in the in the real world.
So it wants to find the goodness in people, but also acknowledges that everybody, except maybe the the innocent one, everyone is flawed.
And, you know, I was I was on your train, Gareth, talking about the center, the holding hands that this film could really do something, bring people together.
But while you were talking, I happened to be looking at some IMDB comments from reviews of the film. And I'm just going to read one. It's very short.
Someone has just just posted this IMDB for Conclave, the user name Thirst-48262.
So Thirst-48262 writes, IMDB, the first hour and a half is excellently made political intrigue with gorgeous cinematography and fantastic acting, shot against the backdrop of the beautiful Vatican architecture.
The beautiful, beautiful Vatican.
Yes. Ray Fiennes is terrific as the dean, running the Conclave and doing his best to unwind the various plots to sabotage the candidacies of several favorites. 9 out of 10 for this part of the movie.
But the last 10 minutes is a bizarrely contrived, ham-fisted, progressive detour that will have you wondering if you're still watching the same film, 3 out of 10. Quote, the church is not tradition, the church is what we do next. Do it tomorrow.
That's the character of the end. That's just Kamala Harris tear, word salad nonsense. Blessings.
Tedesco is the real hero.
Well, God bless. God bless that commenter. There is room for everyone at the table of love.
The only commitment you need to make is to not consciously harm anybody. And what's wrong with progress?
You know, I mean, the very nature of the religion that the Catholic Church is founded on, is authored by a person who erupts into history and says there is more to life than you know, and there is more to who's in than you know.
And so I think it would be, antithetical to what the most noble hopes of this film are to exclude that commenter, even though I think he's mistaken about the movie.
You would sit down and pray with him. You would hold Thurst Hyphen's hand.
I would hope-
He may not hold yours, but-
It's often the case that people then need to know they can trust their political opponents to care about them and the things that matter the most.
One of the problems we're living with right now is that electoral politics, the misuse of power and the hoarding of power has become an idol for people to displace their experience of what it is to just live in the world and be neighbors.
I'm all for the idea that you can have strongly divergent political views and still be kind. It's difficult when the leaders of your political parties aren't kind to each other in public.
Well, we're going to move on quickly. I know there's somebody we want to talk about, but it's difficult for people. You know, BET, for overseas listeners, may not know Black Entertainment Television.
It's a channel here on the US, and they just had a Black Men's Summit I watched the other day. One of the commenters on the summit talking about politics and the role of black men in this country, how they're perceived and how to go forward.
One of the folks, I don't know if it was DL.
Huey, who pointed this out, the comedian or somebody else pointed out, that someone like Donald Trump is what the system lauds as being heroic, someone who has a lot of money, somebody who can act decisively by firing somebody.
And so the fault is not necessarily in Trump, but in the fact that we have this system that says, these are the positive attributes of a leader. We need a better system.
Well, we need a better story in which the system can nest.
Well, we need a better stories of systems. We need systems of stories.
We need a better systemic story system.
How dare you shatter the harmony of this episode in the dying moments of us recording by throwing the discord into the place like a shattered window in a sequestered Vatican room by disagreeing with me about the difference between the word story and
You know, Gareth, not a month goes by.
When I don't wonder what happened to the sort of girlfriend slash kept woman character of Jean Ackman in the conversation, I wonder what happened to her because she disappears, he goes back to her apartment and she's gone.
That character was played by Teri Garr. Not a month goes by, I don't think about that character. Teri Garr, an astonishing performer for many reasons.
Gareth, is she still with us?
She's still with us in the ways that will live on in our hearts. Of course, she died last week. She had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis a long time ago.
One would imagine that these last years were probably an enormous challenge for her. In a strange way, you project, what do you call these parasocial relationships? I never met Teri Garr, she and I were not friends.
I'm assuming the same is true of you, or you probably would have told me, unless you've been carrying on a secret friendship with Teri Garr for all these years, but partly because you were.
No, but it's interesting, you're going to say parasocial because I had the exact, we've never talked, we'd have never talked about Teri Garr before.
No.
And yet I felt that I had a parasocial relationship with her because Teri Garr is the exact same age as my mother and looks just like my mother.
She does look like your mother.
And has the same mannerisms as my mom. And dear listener, in her roles, Teri Garr sort of embodied a certain kind of woman to my mom is that had to navigate patriarchal systems in order to succeed.
Emotionally immature men.
And deal with immature men using her wit and her smarts, her coyness and her sense of the real. And Teri Garr in her films, her filmography is amazing.
The Conversation I've already mentioned, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Young Frankenstein, Mr. Mom, One from the Heart, Black Stallion.
Tootsie.
Tootsie. She embodied the real. You believe this is a real person.
She was a funny person and she was struggling having to deal with living in the system where men were mediocre men or granted so much power. And she did it with a sort of witty joy that is also filled through with exasperation that is just wonderful.
And I always, whenever I saw her, I always thought of her as analogous to my mom. So it's interesting that you mentioned this parasocial thing with her.
Well, I don't think I could say it better than you put it. Other than simply name, she's one of those actors who is a relief to see her on the screen. You know, if she's in something that's not great overall, she's the best thing about it.
And she's also a kind of an anchor for everything else. My favorite Teri Garr performance is Tootsie. I would love it, Jett, if it's not, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's okay.
I'd love it if we could end our discussion of Teri Garr with a clip from Tootsie where she says, I said, good day, Dr. Brewster.
Sure, let's listen to that now.
You don't have a man, so you want to act like one. You're wrong, Dr. Brewster.
I'm very proud of being a woman.
All right, Sandy, wait a minute.
Now this guy treats you like dirt because you're a woman and he's a big doctor, right? But you don't have to take that. You can talk to him on his level.
Show me what you mean.
You're wrong, doctor.
What are you doing, a southern accent? You're wrong, doctor Brewster.
I'm very proud of being a woman.
See, I can't do it as good as you.
Yes, you can.
Just turn the tables on him.
Come on now, will you?
You're wrong, doctor Brewster.
I'm very proud of being a woman.
Where am I off?
I don't know what you're playing.
Well, I'm playing rage.
I'm enraged. You told me that to turn the tables on him, and I'm playing rage.
This is rage? I have a problem with anger.
Yeah, you certainly do, but I'll tell you something.
There's a hundred other actresses reading for this part who don't have a problem with anger, who aren't afraid of working, who aren't afraid to stick everything out on the line and do it.
Well, don't get mad at me.
Well, stop being a doormat, then.
I'm not a doormat.
Act right now.
Do it.
You're wrong, Dr. Brewster.
I am...
Go on. You're wrong, Dr. Brewster.
What do I have to do, hit you with a stick?
You're wrong, Dr. Brewster.
I am very proud to be a woman, and I'm proud of this hospital. And before I see it destroyed by your petty tyrannies... Have the anger.
Don't show it to me.
Don't push.
I recommend to the board that you be thrown out into the street.
Don't lose it now.
Good day, Dr.
Brewster.
Don't whine like you're a second-rate actress.
I said good day.
Not bad. Pretty good. Did you feel how much I hated you?
Did you really?
You felt it?
Yeah, that's why I'm here.
Where are you going?
How am I going to get it back tomorrow?
So that was Teri Garr.
Still with us, Gareth?
She's still with us in our hearts, and, you know, loving the gratitude to people who knew her and cared for her.
Well, thanks for listening to your listeners. This has been an interesting show. At least for me, I can't speak for Gareth, obviously, nor would I want to.
But it's been an interesting show.
But if you did, what would you say?
I'd say it was an interesting show for you too. You know, folks, you can go to patreon.com/thefilmtalk to support us, you can get those bonus episodes. And we're also on Facebook at facebook.com/thefilmtalk.
I am, we're just about to end the show. I am going to go for a walk and I'm going to think about Gareth's question. It was just a one word question.
Why? Why did I fend off faith? Now, in Flash Gordon, Zarkov talks about how did you do it?
How did you defeat the machine? Like, well, I thought about the Beatles and things like that. The great art helped defeat the money.
You want to know how I defeated faith, Gareth? I thought about Zarkov and Flash Gordon. So it became, that scene became the thing in itself.
It's an Ouroboros of Denial and yet also living.
Our new show Ouroboros of Denial will begin on all your favorite podcast platforms whenever we get around to it. See what I got, see what I did there, see what I did there.
Smart, clever.
I've been Gareth Higgins.
I've been, still faithless, but I'm getting concerned, Jett Loe.
We'll keep talking.
Next time.