What Tony Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell said of New Labour – “We don’t do God” – applies also to the Academy Awards. The secular gong-dispensing rite annually sweeps religion off its proverbial red carpet. The last best picture winner to deal with the subject was 2015’s Spotlight, which hardly proselytised for organised religion – it dramatised the Boston Globe’s investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic church. You have to go back to 1973 to find a movie with a priestly protagonist that really beguiled the Academy: William Friedkin’s horror movie The Exorcist received 10 Oscar nominations, winning awards for screenplay and sound.
This year, though, may be different. Two leading contenders, The Brutalist (10 nominations) and Conclave (eight), put faith front and centre. And let’s not forget the perversely charming Holocaust road-trip movie, A Real Pain, shortlisted for best original screenplay and best supporting actor, for Kieran Culkin. If not exactly a meditation on Judaism, Jesse Eisenberg’s film is a beguilingly thoughtful musing on Jewish identity from a self-consciously privileged actor-director whose ancestors survived the Holocaust. A Real Pain serves as a reflection on transgenerational trauma and the meaning of religion after Nazi genocide.
Just maybe, then, there is a new spirit abroad in cinema that takes faith seriously. Even Michael Morris’s romcom Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – not Oscar-nominated, but doing well at the box office – puts faith on screen. Surprising, perhaps, because ostensibly it is everything the pious might sniff at: a sex-positive, profanity-laden flick about a woman getting her freak on with a man 20 years her junior.
In one central scene, Renée Zellweger’s eponymous heroine, grief-stricken after the death of her husband, Mark Darcy, during a humanitarian mission to Sudan, challenges the godless, scientific rationalism of the otherwise discombobulatingly attractive teacher Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Mr Wallaker, you see, has been telling her son’s class that nothing remains of the fruit fly after it completes its life cycle. Our heroine can’t bear – who can? – death’s dominion extending its heartless remit thus and offers a different account of the insect’s posthumous life. “After the body of the fruit fly stops working, then the soul of the fruit fly will be able to be freed,” she explains. Wallaker, the brute, is unimpressed by Bridget’s faith-based philosophy. “The soul of a fruit fly?” he sneers with the froideur of Richard Dawkins.
Yet, in another scene, camping with Bridget’s son, Billy, even Wallaker is compelled to consider that death is not the end. Billy tells the teacher he is worried that he will forget his dad. Wallaker offers solace: “Your dad is everywhere right now in this moment. That’s scientific fact. Energy is only transferred.” What Wallaker seems to be suggesting is that, with a little faith, death might lose its sting.
This spate of faith-related (or at least faith-adjacent) movies might seem to have something to do with Donald Trump’s election and the resurgence of the Christian right. After all, Trump’s White House does do God – or at least exploits religion transactionally to keep the God-fearin’, second-amendment-veneratin’ Maga hordes on side. But that would be fanciful. The Christianity depicted in The Brutalist and Conclave is surely apt to give the Trump-supporting Christian demographic the screaming abdabs.
Conclave, an adaptation of Robert Harris’s novel, certainly goes where previous papal pictures (The Two Popes, We Have a Pope, The Pope Must Die) have not managed to tread: into bookies’ Oscar-night tips. But for some conservative Catholics and Trump-supporters including Megyn Kelly, the film is beyond redemption. Among other things, how dare real-life private deliberations be transmuted into a public – and often laughable – political thriller that shows cardinals as machiavellian monsters or invertebrate liberal milquetoasts through what could be considered anti-Catholic propaganda?
Conclave is certainly not good PR for the Holy See. “We had a pope who was in the Hitler Youth and fought for the Nazis,” reflects one cardinal grimly in the film. “We had popes accused of colluding with communists and fascists. We had popes who have ignored reports of most appalling sexual abuse of children.” “OK, shhh,” says another cardinal. Shushing after the fact, or certainly after those facts, is surely the very definition of fatuity. Even worse for conservative Catholics, the film ends with a new pope who – without wishing to spoil the denouement – confounds patriarchal election practices.
What feels most topically resonant about Conclave is how the snarling, racist, homophobic rightwing candidate, Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), resembles Trump in his hair-trigger anti-diplomacy, while his rival, Stanley Tucci’s suave, plausible, progressive Cardinal Aldo Bellini, is Kamala Harris in a frock.
When a bomb explodes in the Vatican as the cardinals try to figure who has the right stuff to become pontiff, Tedesco is quick to blame Islamists for the attack and castigate, implicitly, the woke blob for its moral shortcomings. “Here we finally see the result of the doctrine of relativism, so dear to our liberal brothers,” Tedesco rages. “A relativism that sees all faiths, all fantasies, have the same weight, so much so that if we look at the homeland of our holy Roman mother church, we see it now dotted with minarets, mosques.” No matter that, like Donald Trump when he claimed US Arabs cheered 9/11, there is no evidence for Tedesco’s account of the attack. Tedesco, as Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this week of Trump, is living in a “disinformation bubble”.
The Brutalist is possibly even more outraging to thin-skinned Trump-supporting American Christians. Its hero, Adrien Brody’s László Tóth, is a Holocaust-surviving, Bauhaus-trained Jewish architect working in cold war Pennsylvania for a psychopathic, philistine, Protestant moneybags (played with chilling efficiency by Guy Pearce). This Wasp monster of purported Christianity, Harrison Lee Van Buren, commissions Tóth to build a cultural centre with an allied chapel honouring his late mama. Tóth brings all his genius to bear on realising this ludicrous Van Buren Institute. Most striking of all in his design is an inverted cross carved into the ceiling of the chapel that admits light at certain times, projecting on to the marble altarpiece below the nearly miraculous image of a sunlit cross the right way up.
What is going on for Tóth in this project? What is it for a Jew to build a Christian place of worship? It’s striking that twice, early in the film, we see our hero singing at a synagogue. It’s as if, as a stranger in the postwar US, he needs Jewish solidarity and spiritual succour. Yet, later in the film, religion is replaced by Tóth’s secular faith in the redemptive power of his architecture to heal what the Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno, in his post-Auschwitz book Minima Moralia, called “damaged life”.
Only in the film’s epilogue do we learn that Tóth’s chapel, ostensibly a place for Christian worship, conceals a deeply personal and very Jewish redemptive message. Beneath the altar is a secret warren of passageways. It is Tóth’s idea that this subterranean network realises an imaginary space – escape tunnels offering what he and his wife were denied in reality when they were imprisoned by the Nazis, he in Buchenwald and she in Dachau. No wonder that Daniel Libeskind, the great Jewish architect whose work has memorialised Holocaust victims by juxtaposing light and voids amid hulking forms, loved The Brutalist.
The film’s fictional architect, though, might well be seen to be expressing a kind of faith, albeit not quite religious, in his concrete masterpiece. In the epilogue, Tóth’s niece tells us that the Van Buren Institute has small rooms modelled on the proportions of the architect’s Buchenwald cell. Each, though, has 20-metre-high ceilings, so that, as visitors look up, they are compelled to see the natural light shining through a glass roof. Why? To inspire visitors with utopian dreams of freedom, Tóth’s niece explains. Quite possibly, what Tóth hoped to inspire visitors to contemplate by means of this dialogue of concrete and light was not just freedom from nazism, but from the manifold snares of mammon and the machine of capitalism.
At least, that was my interpretation. That said, I am not sure that the Academy is ready for the dialectically sophisticated, overwhelmingly humanistic utopian vision of The Brutalist, still less to honour a film that takes faith, religious and secular, seriously. But, come Oscar night, I hope I am proved wrong.
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