Stuff Is Getting Pretty ‘Conclave’-y In The Real Life Conclave

ALSO THIS WEEK: Millions of loose dimes and a suggestion for the latest Miami Vice reboot

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The opening section is free but the rest is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: Where is Stanley Tucci???

It’s hard to think of a movie that had better timing than Conclave. The film about a fictional pope dying and the messy election to replace him hit theaters to solid reviews, then it picked up a bunch of Oscar buzz, then it debuted on Peacock a few weeks ago and became a meme sensation, and then, just after that last thing happened, the real Pope died. Which was not great news for the Pope, I guess. But it was pretty good for the people who made Conclave. And the people who watched it. Especially the people who watched it, actually, because now we all get to sit back and watch things develop in the real-life selection of a new pope and say “this is just like Conclave” to our friends. A little treat.

And it’s already happening, by the way, at least for me, thanks in large part to an article I read this week that had this remarkable headline: “Cardinal Who Threatened To Crash The Conclave Now Says He Won’t.” Folks, this is the good stuff.

The facts are as follows…

A little while back, Pope Francis stripped a cardinal named Becciu of his right to vote for the next pope after Becciu was convicted by a Vatican authority of various financial chicanery. After Francis died, however, Becciu announced that the Pope had forgiven him and reversed the ban and that he would be showing up to the conclave to vote even though he was not on the list of invited cardinals. This led to a lot of grown men in robes saying things like “nuh uh” and “yes huh” back and forth for a while until an Italian newspaper reported that someone in the Vatican — please do picture Ralph Fiennes here — found a written communication from this year in which Francis reaffirmed the ban. Now, Becciu, who maintains his innocence, has agreed to stay home.

People are still mad, though. Especially the members of the conservative wing of the Catholic Church, who were counting on Becciu’s vote to help bolster their chances. (In the world of Conclave, this makes Becciu — who my autocorrect keeps wanting me to call “Becky,” which is very funny — kind of a cross between Tedesco and John Lithgow, but with less vaping.) (Probably.) It all led one of the cardinals who backs Becciu to say this about the situation…

“It’s a question of where is the document where the pope expressed it,” said Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller of Germany, who said he had never seen anything beyond the single line from the press office. “And to exclude the cardinal from his rights? There must be not only a decision of the pope, there must be a cause, a failure. And he did nothing wrong, no?”

… which is a pretty funny thing to say about a man who was the first cardinal to ever be tried by the Vatican’s criminal court and who was found guilty of embezzling hundreds of thousands of Euros. But, you know, other than all that…

The takeaway here is this: If you, like me, just watched Conclave a few weeks ago and have proclaimed yourself an expert on the procedural guidelines and political maneuvering of the Vatican, these are all thrilling developments. It really is just like Conclave. All we need now is a handful of tight zooms on Stanley Tucci’s face crunched up into a look of concern. Those shouldn’t be too hard to find.

FOUR: I am kind of excited about The Rock’s new Serious Actor turn