Is The Conclave or The Apprentice more controversial? 

Last week I watched a bunch of movies that are considered controversial but remain buzzy for award season. I watched: 

• The Conclave which many are calling the best film of the year but many Catholics feel is an attack on their faith. 
• The Apprentice which couldn’t get a wide release because it is so allegedly defamatory to President Donald Trump. 
• Juror #2 which many are calling the most underrated movie of the year but for seemingly no reason other than it was directed by conservative Clint Eastwood did not get a wide release.
• Megalopolis who had half of audiences and critics celebrating and half angrily scratching their head claiming it was the worst movie ever made. 

I’m going to break down each of these from worst to best. 

Worst by a long mile: The Apprentice 

I don’t think its a big surprise that I hated The Apprentice. The (probably) defamatory film clings to the protection of “fiction” while making salacious and totally unprovable claims about Donald Trump and those around him including claims which are criminal in nature. Other claims while not criminal point to character flaws which are such bad misrepresentations of Donald Trump they are truly immoral. For example, one scene has Trump treating his brother Fred very badly before he died. To make this claim despite how often Trump has expressed deep pain and grief about his brother with absolutely no evidence the events transpired is truly the lowest a human being can possibly go. Additionally the film depicts Trump drinking in one scene and Trump has unwaveringly claimed repeatedly he has never had a single drink. The whole thing is despicable.

It’s real crime is that it’s tedious. Setting aside that it’s a leftist wet dream about a completely fictional Donald Trump that exists only in liberal fantasies, the movie is lame. I know the cast and crew of The Apprentice really thought they were doing something so brave and special but making movies about conservative Presidents has been done to death and they’re always crap. See W. The best they could come up with is make Donald Trump mean to people and a shady business dealer with absolutely zero evidence of that being true. They made their number one villain’s life and rise seem pretty tame and boring all things considered. If a Republican was going to do a smear movie on a top democrat like Hillary Clinton they could pretty easily write her as a serial killer. The Apprentice at the very least could have tried to be interesting. 

Jeremy Strong in his role of Roy Cohn was absolutely outlandishly cartoonish and not remotely believable but has already been nominated for a Golden Globe for the part. The material for Cohn was schizophrenic. At once he was a money grubbing ghoul with no moral integrity (frankly it was a little anti semitic) and then he suddenly is a martyr of gaydom who Donald Trump has greatly betrayed and mistreated. Strong does nothing to bridge this cognitive dissonance. Awful showing. 

One caveat, Sebastian Stan’s performance as Donald Trump is actually so good that it almost is able to transcend the awful material except it falls apart at the end because the material is so ridiculous that no performance in the world could overcome it. Stan throughout the first act of the film played Donald Trump with a lot of subtlety and care – it was a far cry from caricature. Until the last 30 minutes or so, Stan dared to take his character’s side and give a faithful portrayal of Donald Trump as a young and ambitious man. 

Not bad or good really (I think) was Megalopolis 

Megalopolis is Francis Ford Coppala’s passion project which took him years and great expense to create. It had critics and audiences deeply divided and in viewing, it’s clear why. I’m not sure I know what the movie ws per se. But I think I liked it kind of.

The surrealist story follows the fall of Rome imagined in a modern American setting. A city has fallen to crime, debauchery, corruption and destruction. A visionary played by Adam Driver rises, having invented a new kind of building material to tear down old parts of town and put up new, innovative buildings which will give the city a true future – save Rome essentially. 

Driver’s character is a young and ambitious developer and inventor who has enemies in the government and is always being fought by the ambitious rich people who want to stop him from putting up nicer buildings. The rich manipulate the immigrant class into violent riots against him and they collude with the media to sully the name of the hero. It was a pretty based story whether or not Coppola intended it to be. It kind of seems like Coppola tricked a bunch of liberals into thinking Shia LaBeouf’s villain character was meant to be Donald Trump because of the use of confederate imagery and ‘make great again’ slogans. But if I had to compare the hero character to a modern figure it would be Elon Musk (a visionary who believes human ingenuity can produce a bright and lasting future for planet earth) and in a lot of ways Donald Trump (an ambitious young developer who meets resistance from the current hegemony in his rise to power and is protested by immigrants). 

The movie is very weird and on its face very unjustly pretentious. But I think it’s only pretentious if you don’t think Coppola was at all in on the joke. There is something so absurd about it that it’s sort of wonderful again. It is completely batty, but never confusing. It’s easy to follow and yet there is actually nothing to follow. One critic compared it to late Shakespear. Kind of weird and nobody asked for it or wants it but also kind of great.

Extremely good is Juror #2 

Setting aside the big ticket movies of the year like Dune 2 and Wicked, Juror #2 is one of the best things I’ve seen all year. There is no way to describe what the movie is about without ruining the enjoyment. Very basically, it is a courtroom drama following the jury deliberation of a murder trial. The cast is absolutely packed to the brim with talent and everyone hands in a top performance. Leading the cast is Nicholaus Holt (The Great) who is brilliant as the titular character, but the film also features Toni Collette (Hereditary) as a politically active District Attorney and Gabriel Basso as the accused murderer (J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy) and other members of the jury include J.K. Simmons (Whiplash), the criminally undersung Leslie Bibb (Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby), and Cederick Yarbrough (Speechless). 

Clint Eastwood at 96 years old directed this movie and it lived up to his long and iconic career. Eastwood created tension and intrigue in a story about jury duty. What may have been an otherwise slow paced movie is made gripping in Eastwood’s care. Even with the disadvantage of audience omnipotence (viewers know everything right from the start), Juror #2 manages to be exciting. 

The Conclave was extremely good, but the controversy is not without merit 

The Conclave is a rightful contender for Best Picture on the award circuit. Read here for a spoiler but an explanation of what the controversy is for the Catholic community. 

The first part of the controversy is simply the political nature of the depiction of the conclave. As described in the piece above and broadly discussed online, some catholics felt the movie intended to undermine the idea of sanctity and holiness in the papal selection process. I disagree entirely with that representation of the film. In fact, I would say as a protestant woman who does not believe in the holiness (per se) of the papacy or in its selection that the film made a pretty compelling argument in favor of it. I would go so far as to say I’ve never been more swayed in favor of Catholic views than in viewing this film. I think a viewer who is maybe a little less close to the issue at hand would see a film which passionately depicted the flaws of man and the absolute divinity of Jesus Christ. The idea which moved me so deeply in the film was that there is no sin on earth that can stop God and that God all through history and today has worked through flawed men including flawed Popes and cardinals. 

Further, it also humanized cardinals I think in a powerful way. Yes there was politicking. But rarely (or truly never) is a viewer led to believe that any one of the cardinals was wholly consumed by those politics and in fact, they often apologize for them and show real remorse. There is a real sense that a few cardinals have gotten carried away in a momentous time, not that they are broadly a corrupt group. 

Finally, while the hero of the story who is the dean of the conclave played by Ralph Fiennes sides with the more liberal cardinals who favor policies reflected in the current real life Pope, the opposition speaks eloquently on their conservative side. The movie presented the conservative cardinals as opponents but it never dismissed or watered down their arguments. They expressed ideas and arguments which were compelling and frankly half the viewing audience was likely swayed to agreeing with. 

Setting aside what I believe was a very compelling and thoughtful story about the conclave and the papal selection process, the film was beautifully made. The sets were so gorgeous I initially thought it was partly filmed at the Vatican (it wasn’t). There was not a bad performance in the entire cast and notably Stanley Tucci as the lead liberal cardinal (Bellini) was truly phenomenal and Sergio Casellito was so believable as the main conservative cardinal (Tedesco) that I really just felt like a real cardinal wandered on to set and gave his thoughts.

I would encourage conservative viewers to give The Conclave a chance. The surprise ending of The Conclave is really the point of most controversy in terms of my argument that the film largely makes a case for the unstoppable nature of God’s holy will. And my interpretation of the ending is more about the flawed nature of Fiennes character (Cardinal Lawrence) who is depicted as the most pure and pious throughout the movie than it is about circumventing God’s will. Lawrence spends the entire movie seeking truth and justice but in the very last moments because of his own agenda, fails to evenly apply that truth and justice. But I concede after consulting my Catholic friends that the last 5 minutes, the big twist, is definitely the most agenda driven part of the film due to specific Catholic beliefs on the papacy. See above link for the spoiler and clarity on what I might mean.