By Alexander Payne
Recently I’d been watching a bunch of artsy-fartsy stuff when I saw “Conclave” — yes, projected — and within the first five minutes I thought, oh good, a movie. A real, old-fashioned movie-movie like Grandma used to make. Classy too. We don’t get enough of those anymore, and when we do, I’m excited.
Sure, I’d admired “All Quiet on the Western Front” plenty, even if it didn’t exactly have a whole lot of laughs. But it was also a good movie, and it had made me think, who is this Edward Berger guy?
How does he know how to do all this fancy stuff, plus cast so many great actors and direct them so well? I make movies myself occasionally, but I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to blow people up or the guts to ask the art department to dig all those trenches and make all those big puddles.
Then he makes “Conclave” and takes the same imagination and meticulousness that he put into the big war movie and focuses it like a surgeon on a contained story about the intrigues and schemes behind the scenes when a pope dies. You just can’t believe how riveting it is — funny and suspenseful and so well-cast and well- acted. Berger has the miraculous quality of making something you never forget is a movie, but at the same time, it’s as though you’re actually there.
They’re very different movies, but they share a consistent theme. They’re both about unmasking powerful institutions and revealing the massive egos calling the shots for the masses — egos alternately noble and ignoble, mostly the latter.
What joy that Edward Berger walks among us. I miss the movies we used to have — healthy-budgeted human dramas and comedies with great movie stars and visual scope, movies like we used to get from Pollack, Forman, Minghella and Pakula — you know, good movies.
If this Berger mug plays his cards right, he’s well on his way to standing right beside them.
Director Alexander Payne has made eight feature films including “Election,” “Sideways,” “The Descendants,” “About Schmidt,” “Nebraska” and “The Holdovers,” and has been nominated for seven Academy Awards, including two wins for adapted screenplay.