Television Review: Jude Law steps into the snazzy shoes of T.V.’s latest Very Bad Man in the dazzling and confounding “The Young Pope”.
What the hell are we supposed to make of Lenny Belardo — sorry, Pope Pius XIII, or “Your Holiness,” as he prefers to be called — the fictional pontiff at the center of HBO’s bugged-out new dramatic series, “The Young Pope”? Because Lenny is played by Jude Law, we know he’s not some crusty, dogmatic old European codger. Law plays Lenny an American through and through: one of the classically handsome, blue-eyed and square-jawed variety (Your Holiness also possesses a rather alarming addiction to Cherry Coke Zero). The character’s ebony-white helicopter matches his papal robes, but otherwise, it wouldn’t look out of place in a gangster rap music video.
Perhaps the most alarming chink in Lenny’s gilded façade is his effortless penchant for disappearing into his ego, which is to say nothing of his nakedly authoritarian politics. In spite of his youthful appearance, this new Pope’s worldview is severe and defiantly conservative, even by the Catholic Church’s standards. He’s a deluded demagogue, one who promises to wind back the clocks on sinners, homosexuals and anyone who does not worship at his altar. Sound like anybody you know?
Potential presidential parallels aside, this is all another way of saying that Lenny is T.V.’s latest Very Bad Man: another morally anguished antihero in a long line that includes, but is not limited to Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Walter White, Bobby Cannavale huffing coke and screaming about the purity of rawk on “Vinyl” and eh, Bojack Horseman. However, this superficial jump-off point is where the similarities begin and end. For better or for worse — and there are plenty of people who will feel both ways about this new show, now airing Sunday nights on HBO at 9pm — I’ve never seen anything quite like “The Young Pope,” and certainly not on cable television. Even if the basic plotting never rises too far above “House of Cards”-style power plays, the look of the show is pure European expressionism: like one of Powell and Pressburger’s fevered fantasias, but tempered with the grotesquerie and theological introspection of Fellini’s “Satyricon”. Like Lenny himself, “The Young Pope” is profane and blasphemous, beautiful and utterly ridiculous and impossible to look away from. I’m not sure if this technically makes the show great, but I say we give “The Young Pope” points for chutzpah alone. This is possibly the most bizarre hour-long pilot to get a greenlight from HBO and if the remaining nine episodes maintain the same level of “wait, what the fuck was that” invention, then we’re in for quite a ride.
“The Young Pope” is the latest journey into the mind of Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, who directed all ten episodes of season one. Sorrentino is the director of riotous, surreal foreign pictures like “Il Divo” and “The Great Beauty,” as well as domestic efforts like “This Must Be The Place,” in which Sean Penn was an aging glam rocker searching for salvation, and also 2015’s “Youth,” which cast Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel as old dogs reliving their twilight years at an elegant Swiss spa. Sorrentino, of course, has never made his Fellini fixation a secret, and anyone who’s seen even one frame of his work — including “The Young Pope” — can attest that the comparison has merit. Sorrentino digs flash, pomp, dream sequences, loud blasts of music, ample-chested aging queens and the search for God as it manifests itself through creative expression. Plot, of course, is never on his mind, though “The Young Pope” pays more attention to its narrative machinations then most of the director’s work.
Sorrentino’s principal fixation as a storyteller seems to be the reconciliation between the responsibilities of manhood and the temptation of creating your own mythology. In “The Great Beauty,” the hard-partying paparazzi at the center of the story, Jep, finds himself adrift in middle age, living inside the narcotic nexus of a permanent bacchanal that just barely conceals the emptiness of his own existence. Similarly, in “This Must Be The Place” and “Youth,” vain male artistes, teetering on the knife’s edge of cliché and irrelevance, must come to terms with the emotional collateral damage they’ve wreaked on their loved ones. We question, as the characters must — can these holy fools be forgiven?
In “The Young Pope,” Lenny Belardo asks not if he will be forgiven, only that others should forgive him for any transgressions he should commit, in addition to submitting their will to him entirely. Like the protagonists in Sorrentino’s other works, he is a walking contradiction: a wolf in Saint’s clothing who is never more terrifying then when Law flashes his familiar matinee idol smile. It doesn’t hurt that the British actor plays Lenny with the icy, commanding resolve of a real-deal draconian autocrat: he contorts his movie star features into grimaces and wordless stares that freeze the blood, even as Sorrentino pumps up the onscreen pyrotechnics to a frequently overzealous degree.
Law is better here than he’s been in years as Lenny, and he makes the character a T.V. villain for the books. I’m hoping that Law’s juicy turn will seduce viewers for whom “The Young Pope” might just be too weird to qualify as satisfying Sunday night viewing. Whether the show will actually succeed on its wackadoodle promise remains to be seen, but in its first three episodes, it has set one of the most interesting precedents for any hour-long drama currently on the air. Beneath the show’s familiar shifting of power politics and its standard-issue antihero monologuing is the soul of a freaky European arthouse experiment and I, for one, couldn’t be more excited about the prospect of these two sensibilities colliding.
We first see Lenny — sorry, Pope Pius XIII, “Your Holiness” — crawling from underneath a mound of infants and unto the glimmering nighttime lights of the Piazza San Marco. Later, we see him addressing a throng of admirers in St. Peter’s Basilica, whipping them into a fervor with promises of taking the Catholic Church back to a kind of golden age. Sorrentino shoots the scene in drab greys before punctuating it with bursts of color as umbrellas pop open to greet the coming rain. It’s a marvelous sight — one of many in “The Young Pope’s” pilot episode.
Then, before you can say Cherry Coke Zero, poof — Lenny’s crowd of admirers disappears. Of course, Lenny is goading his followers; sacrilege is the new normal in Pope Pius’ Vatican City. Sorrentino’s strategy here is a kind of Russian nesting-doll technique: a fantasy within a fantasy. Even the sequences where Pope Pius walks through the Vatican grounds have a kind of rhapsodic, removed quality to them. Law’s pontiff seems to glide past immaculately arranged tableaus of holy figures, all of whom almost seem framed and arranged like figures on a chess board. It’s a beautifully disorienting way to lay the groundwork for your show, but when it comes to bringing the weirdness, “The Young Pope” is just getting started.
The first episode mainly deals with Pope Pius’ initial ascent to power and his quick and nimble mastery of the politics of Vatican City. No one quite knows how Pius came to power, or why he’s insistent on rebuking his superiors and displaying inscrutability to the public at every turn (this show really does not go easy on the Trump parallels). Like any good fascist, Pius doesn’t trust a soul and he’s wary of anyone who might show him any degree of compassion. “Friendly relationships are dangerous,” he intones at one point. “They lend themselves to ambiguities, misunderstandings, and conflicts, and they always end badly.” There’s also the case of Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Voiello, a soft-spoken sycophant who wants to oust Pius from his current seat of power, as well as Lenny’s mentor, Cardinal Spencer (James Cromwell, hammy but effective), a moral crusader with the mean streak of a spurned fundamentalist.
The only one of God’s living creatures for whom the new Vatican kingpin seems to feel any sort of empathy is the shy and kind Sister Mary (played in a strangely muted turn by Diane Keaton), whom he quickly appoints as his second in command. Mary is a nun who took Lenny in when he was a lonely young orphan (we glimpse the character’s past in rapturous, teasingly elucidated flashbacks). It remains to be seen whether Mary will be able to resist the toxic specter of influence that seems to emanate from Your Holiness’ finely-manicured papal grip like so much designer cologne, but we have seven episodes of television to see where this story will go and given the lack of narrative predictability already on display here, I’m tempted to resist the easy assessment.
“The Young Pope’s” penchant for ridiculous acts of extravagance and flamboyance has already made it a target for jaundiced critical types and Meme enthusiasts alike. And to be fair, the show is far from perfect. Already in the first three episodes, there’s a noticeable absence of engaging female parts (Sister Mary feels slightly underwritten, and is mostly lent gravitas through Keaton’s performance) and the charm of the show’s kaleidoscopic, circus-freak vibe certainly has its limits, occasionally dipping into Baz Luhrmann levels of stylish overkill. And yet “The Young Pope” ultimately won me over precisely because there’s nothing quite like it on television at the moment. In a T.V. landscape where even purportedly renegade showrunners are still sticking to well-established television guidelines, when someone does something genuinely, undeniably new, it’s hard not to take notice. Even when the gulf between the astounding tricks that Sorrentino manages as a surface-level visual magician and the show’s thorny, complicated religious subtext don’t quite mesh, the resulting discord provides its own kind of thrill.
Law is having a ball playing this unabashed power-monger, delivering one of his funniest and most watchable performances in years. He is a stately, skilled actor who can be dull in the wrong role, though he’s proven to be both capable as a leading man (the tepid remake of “Alfie,” in which he was the sole engaging presence as Michael Caine’s heir apparent) as well as a supporting character-actor type (Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel”). In a way, Law’s turn as this messianic tyrant reminded me of his performance in David O. Russell’s great, underappreciated “I Heart Huckabee’s”. In that film, Law played Brad Stand: a corporate shill who is both utterly convinced of his superiority over others and also totally oblivious to deep the deep well of insecurity and self-loathing that roils beneath his well-scrubbed veneer.
The glimpses that we get of Pope Pius’ humanity in “The Young Pope” are faint, as Law is having too much fun sinking his teeth into such a classically loathsome role, but they are there. Law lets us see through to the Pope’s buried soul, even in something as fleeting as a malevolent twinkle in the eye, or the way Lenny might lean in towards a potential enemy when addressing them. The archetype of the charismatic and morally conflicted television scumbag is nothing new, but this sole narrative crux is probably the only thing about “The Young Pope” that I’d call time-tested.
Somehow, “The Young Pope’s” second and third episodes are even wilier, wackier and flat-out weirder than the pilot. Lenny delivers a breathless and brilliantly constructed monologue wherein he compares himself to Stanley Kubrick, J.D. Salinger and Banksy and champions the virtue of obtaining omnipotence while remaining unseen, all before he shocks St. Peter’s square with an address he gives while sheathed in a cloud of very literal darkness. There’s also… the matter of a Kangaroo who’s been hopping around the Vatican gardens, not to mention a colossal opening credits sequence in the third episode that’s nothing short of Scorsesean in its rock n’ roll bombast. Because that’s exactly the kind of show this is: one where you get your psychedelic religious dream sequences stashed next to your standard-issue T.V. power plays and non-sequiturs involving kangaroos. Ladies and gentlemen, “The Young Pope” is here. Buckle up.
Grade: “Episode One,” B+. “Episode Two,” A-. “Episode Three,” B+.
