Faced with the chaotic unknown or the abjectly terrifying, some turn to wine and others to snack food. There are even people who channel their stress in healthy, productive ways, speed walking or enjoying sound bath meditation. But I go to the movies.
That’s where I headed last weekend, desperate to hang onto a wisp of sanity in the run-up to the election. First in the queue: “Conclave,” an Oscar-bound movie set in the Vatican that promised to whisk me off far and away.
The movie opens with the untimely death of a beloved pope. With much pomp and ceremony, the world’s cardinals convene at the Vatican to elect his replacement. Ralph Fiennes, subtly formidable as ever, is Cardinal Lawrence, charged with overseeing the election. Besieged by doubt, both in his faith and in his capacity to manage what may be a contentious process, Lawrence approaches the task like an election administrator assigned to Pima County, Ariz. Bracing for a fight.
It looks to be a contest between Cardinal Tedesco, a conservative who wants the church to return to the Latin liturgy, and Cardinal Bellini, the designated favorite in Lawrence’s circle, a man who loudly insists he doesn’t want the job (of course he does) and that as a liberal who believes women should play a greater role in the Curia, he’ll never get elected anyway (but he thinks he should).
Is no election easy? Several third-party — that is, alternative — contenders quickly emerge. One is a Canadian cardinal with a shady past. Another is a Nigerian who would be the first pope from Africa but who also believes homosexuals should burn in hell. A dark horse surfaces in the form of a Mexican who had been secretly appointed by the pope as cardinal of Afghanistan.
“How many Catholics are there in Afghanistan?” Bellini asks, indignant. His candidacy now at risk, he starts lashing out at dissenters.
“If we liberals are not united, Tedesco will become pope,” he rages. “If Tedesco becomes pope, he will undo 60 years of progress.” A third ballot is quickly followed by a fourth and then a fifth, favorites rising and tumbling as factions conspire to reveal damaging information about their rivals.
“Nothing terrifies our colleagues more than the thought of yet more sexual scandals,” Lawrence remarks at one point. By the time he asked, “Is this what we’re reduced to? Considering the least worst option?,” I was elbow deep in my popcorn and in need of a refill. I may not have escaped the real world after all.
In search of levity, I set off the following night to see “Rumours,” the new comic horror film from the Canadian auteur Guy Maddin, working with the brothers Evan and Galen Johnson. I plunged into the wooded grounds of a remote castle in Germany where a fictional version of the G7 leaders gathered to write the draft of a provisional statement addressing an unidentified global crisis, with the sort of weak-kneed indecision that surely created the crisis in the first place.
We “should be clear with the communiqué but not so clear that we put ourselves in, you know, an awkward position,” Cate Blanchett as the German chancellor (high strung, efficacious, self-satisfied) confides to the French president (rotund, pontificating, self-important). “Yes, of course, exactement,” he concurs knowingly.
The group soon finds themselves abandoned by their entourages while shadowy figures — “Protesters?!” — from the surrounding woods emerge threateningly. As the global crisis closes in, the essential character of each world leader emerges, “allegorically,” as the French president put it. Blanchett, a saucy version of Angela Merkel, and Nikki Amuka-Bird, the no-nonsense British prime minister, quietly compete to prove themselves strong leaders and to win the attentions of the Canadian prime minister, a lusty, man-bunned Justin Trudeau stand-in. The aging American president, who uses an American flag as a bib, prefers peaceful slumber to action and at one point, says he’d rather be assassinated than submit to “this ignominious sloughing away.”
Though the world leaders excel at small-group task forces, tossing around phrases like “global jurisdiction,” “domestic opposition” and “bilateral management,” their paperwork is carried away by the wind. Fancy titles and diplomatic exchanges are little help in the face of an onslaught of immediate challenges, which include menacing, zombified bog bodies, a gigantic, disembodied brain and a hysterical secretary- general of the European Commission who babbles about an impending major attack from the Belgian authorities.
You try to get away and what do you get? An acrimonious election between a liberal idealist and a conservative who wants to turn the clock back. An urgent global crisis confronting leaders who are demonstrably not up to the task.
In the spirit of our state of suspended anticipation, I won’t reveal spoilers. Suffice to say, neither concludes with the obvious or expected ending. Such is the world we are living in. Each at least delivers some form of justice. Would that we might soon find similar resolution in the real world.
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