Bless me, Father for I have sinned: It’s been a while since I’ve been able to get fully on board with Paolo Sorrentino. But showing me and all other unbelievers that the emperor of recent follies like “Youth” and “This Must Be The Place” (and also, in fairness, the Oscar-winning “The Great Beauty” which is fine) has perhaps been fully clothed the whole time — and in gorgeous, gold-accented, flowing robes at that — here’s “The Young Pope,” the twisted, funny, frightening, deeply weird HBO series Sorrentino has written and directed. Pitched perfectly (at least in its feature-length first episode) between irony, absurdity and caustic cautionary tale with real-world resonances, shot pristinely (bar a couple of ropy effects shots) by Sorrentino regular Luca Bigazzi, “The Young Pope” invites comparisons to “House of Cards,” in its knotty politicking and charismatic, ruthless central character. But that neglects the uncanny aspect of religious power, the mandate from the big guy in the sky to exert influence over not just the circumstances, but the thoughts, dreams, the very souls of the faithful — territory not even Frank Underwood could reach. It lends the show an added spooky dimension — here, eeriness is next to Godliness — which is complemented by the beautifully sustained ambiguity at its dark heart.
Personified by Jude Law, giving the best performance of his career in the best role of his career, Pope Pius XIII, aka Lenny Belardo is the first American Pope in history and at 47, the youngest on record since maybe the 11th century. When we meet him, he is already in office and the only white smoke in the air rises from his cigarette, as he casually breaks John Paul II’s ban on smoking in the palace. His relative youth, insistence on breakfasting on Diet Cherry Coke and rebellious stance on nicotine point to him being progressive, a rule-breaker, a breath of fresh, albeit tobacco-scented air, through the stuffy confines of the ultra-traditionalist institution of the Roman Catholic Church.
That’s certainly the expectation set up by the clever opening sequence. After the striking image of the white-clad Pope crawling out from beneath a writhing mountain of dying babies piled in the middle of Venice’s St Mark’s Square, to much fainting of cardinals and dropping of jaws, the Pope, wreathed in semi-miraculous sunshine, delivers a revolutionary address to the massed faithful from his Vatican balcony. In it, he embraces masturbation, gay marriage, contraception, abortion, stem cell research, in vitro fertilization and every other Catholic bugbear you can think of. “I gave the most extraordinary speech,” he says later with a faint sardonic smile, as he recounts what was, of course, a dream.
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The progressive ideals he puts forth during that that surreal opening, in which fragmentary images and tableaux and jump cuts might make you briefly wonder if this show will be the next phase of our “Golden Age” and allow television to actually acquire the status of “art,” turn out to be very different to those he holds. Apparently under the impression he’d be an easily malleable puppet (according to the Greek chorus of gossiping cardinals), Cardinal Voiello (Silvio Orlando) who is nicknamed “The Holy Spirit” by those in the know, so all-encompassing is his power, arranged Lenny’s election in conclave. But now Voiello must face the fact that he might have made a very rare, but very grave mistake, as Lenny’s first act is to put him firmly to one side, in favor of the nun who raised him as an orphan, Sister Mary (Diane Keaton, so good to see you!). Where she is Lenny’s de facto mother, his father figure is Cardinal Spencer (James Cromwell) whose own claim on the papacy was, to his great bitterness, usurped by his protege. The earthly mysteries surrounding Lenny’s parentage, upbringing and history with these two surrogates are almost as intriguing and opaque as those concerning his unknowable relationship to God. “I have always had a gift for concealing my intentions,” he says.
That concealment, behind Law’s impenetrable eyes, is key to what makes “The Young Pope” so unusual, even by the standards of today’s quality TV. Daring though it still is, after all, it’s relatively easy to take cheap shots at religion and religiosity, and to find in it subjects for ridicule. And “The Young Pope” is not above that, whether it’s showing priests texting during confession or lusting after 25,000 year-old stone statues of naked women and then expected to do penance for gerontophilia, or being admonished by a superior as to the exact length of sycophantic laugh that would have been appropriate for a given witticism.
So it would have been easy to have not gone beyond that and to have made a satire about the Vatican in which the Pope is a fool, a puppet, a secret atheist and/or a sexual hypocrite. Lenny might yet prove to be any of those things, but the central brilliance of “The Young Pope” so far is we just don’t know. And that ignorance leaves open the most terrifying possibility of all: that he might be the real deal — the actual earthly representative of actual, extant God. The scary, funny, daring and weird part is that, if that’s the case, you can forget the love-and-forgiveness stuff, because this God is a right bastard. [A-]
Click here to see our full coverage from the 2016 Venice Film Festival.
