Since then, HBO has aired three more episodes of Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s TV series—with new installments going up each Sunday and Monday night. And after spending two more hours with the show (I haven’t yet seen the fourth episode, which dropped last night), I would like to revise my reply to that co-worker.
The Young Pope is fucking amazing!!
It’s no less strange or slow, but it builds on its peculiar rhythms into something totally fascinating. Jude Law, as the young pope, is dynamite, the best and most menacing he’s been since The Talented Mr. Ripley—and his character is drawn in complicated shades, so he's more than just a royal dick with some leftover issues from childhood. Lenny Belardo's path to the papacy comes from his totally undistracted, almost martyr-like relationship with God, and he seems to require the same pain and sacrifice from his congregation. The show has a lot to say about Catholicism and spirituality in general—its main thesis seems to be that our attitudes toward the divine are in fact mirrors reflecting our own individual dispositions—but if the religious overtones of the show strike you as a turn-off, you’re really missing out, because Sorrentino’s got quite a lot to say about human nature for even the godless among us, juxtaposing the political machinations of the Vatican against the players' personal relationships with the silent unknown.
Law’s not the only actor pulling weight. Diane Keaton as a nun hasn’t really proven herself just yet, but Silvio Orlando as Cardinal Voiello, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, is astounding, a portly, lisping, bespectacled, scheming cardinal with a prominent mole who appears to put more faith in his favorite soccer players than he does in Jesus Christ. There’s something vaguely heroic about him, even as conventional storytelling tropes require him to be framed as a villain, at least in the early stages of the story. The other actors are just as wonderful, and Sorrentino has a Fellini-esque affinity for faces, a painterly approach to framing and lighting them so that they tell fascinating stories even in stillness.
The show is frequently fucking hilarious. There’s a scene in Episode 2, in which the newly anointed pope interviews the cardinal who functions as the prefect for the congregation of the clergy, that had me rolling (it’s better not to spoil it). And Sorrentino’s most audacious filmmaking strokes land brilliantly, as in the opening credits for Episode 3, in which a meteor crashes through a series of religious artworks while Law serenely strolls past them, or the random-seeming cut in Episode 2 to a group of religious pilgrims in a bus, on their way to hear the pope’s first public address. And despite The Young Pope's often measured pace, Sorrentino’s aptitude for forward momentum is inescapable, seen by example in the way he builds up tension as Keaton’s Sister Mary spies on Voiello embarking on what looks like a scandalous assignation but turns out to be something entirely different. The director’s previous work has frequently been astounding (if you haven’t seen The Great Beauty, jesus, get on that), but he makes terrific use of all the extra room a TV series affords to stretch out his ideas. Resultantly, The Young Pope possesses none of the dense claustrophobia of his otherwise excellent Il Divo or the clipped, frustrating ambiguity of a movie like Youth. (To be sure, there’s lots of ambiguity in The Young Pope, but it’s an asset that gives the show a mysterious, inquisitive, even suspenseful quality that something like Westworld desperately craved but couldn’t grasp.)
The Young Pope’s airing in the US during the first days of the Trump administration can only be a coincidence, and while Pope Pius XIII is a very different beast from our Tangerine Nightmare, the bafflement and worry his constituents experience feels intensely familiar. The young pope is, to be certain, a Machiavellian despot in every sense, and while his soul may seem as empty as that of our Orange Oval Officer, his brain certainly is not. Much has been said about the parallels between Law's character and swoop-haired Donald, but this is ultimately an empty reason to be interested in the show, which isn't about the shocking adventures of a wily new pope in the Vatican but about why we cling to institutions like the church in the first place. In a world we experience subjectively, what is it about us that needs to place value in an authority structure that offers some sort of objective version of reality? And do those who we place in power become prisoners themselves?
I guess what I’m saying is, if, like me, you weren’t fully convinced by that first episode, stick with The Young Pope. It’s unlike anything else on TV—exquisite and odd and flamboyant and thoughtful—and it’s only gotten better with each subsequent hour I’ve seen so far. I have little use for a 10-hour exploration of Catholic doctrine, but The Young Pope is about that topic about as much as The Wire was "about" dealing drugs. It’s merely a backdrop for a tapestry about power structures, human nature, and making one’s way through the utter absurdity and seeming futility of life. To be sure, what Sorrentino and his co-writers (including Terry Gilliam collaborator Tony Grisoni) have to say about the people we put into power feels like utterly mandatory viewing to me right now. But The Young Pope also a gratuitously delicious confection—a show that lets a kangaroo loose in the West’s most hallowed institution, quite literally. Its tongue is firmly in cheek even as its eyes are on the heavens.