Oscar nominees: Should biopics leave politics blowing in the wind?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The Best Picture nominees at this year’s Oscars include two movies whose main characters embody a political truth that escapes too many of America’s Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, only one of the films allows viewers to see it.
In Conclave, a drama about the selection of a new pope, Cardinal Lawrence (played by Ralph Fiennes) delivers a brief speech around which the plot revolves. “There is one sin I’ve come to fear above all others: certainty," Lawrence says. “Certainty is the great enemy of unity.
Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end." The message is clearly directed at the Church’s conservative wing. Unsurprisingly, the movie has been popular among liberals and panned by conservatives.
Ben Shapiro dismissed it as “propaganda about the evils of the Catholic Church," and Megyn Kelly called it a “disgusting anti-Catholic film." It’s neither. But nor is it really about the Church. It’s about politics, and the blindness that afflicts rigid ideologies of all types.
The righteous intolerance of the left can be as oppressive and misguided as that of the right, as many who have been attacked by liberal mobs (online or otherwise)—or felt themselves censoring their own thoughts—can attest. Whether liberal viewers recognize that Lawrence’s speech takes aim at them too is an open question. The movie could have made that point more explicit, but it at least invites viewers into a conversation on the topic.
The same cannot be said of the Best Picture nominee whose protagonist challenged certainty on the left. A Complete Unknown is about a young Bob Dylan’s arrival in New York and his rise to stardom. The drama builds up to one of
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