About That <i>Young Pope</i>
Imagine, if you can, that an unlikely outsider ascends to one of the highest offices in the world, benefited by the machinations of a group of schemers who assume he’ll be easy to control, and will rely on their wisdom to govern. But the new leader is, it turns out, completely unfit for office: petulant, greedy, and with a yen for publicly humiliating people. Thanks to an unhappy childhood, he’s a bottomless pit of emotional need, and those surrounding him are suddenly forced to confront the awful reality of their choice, and how acutely it threatens the foundations of a major global power.
That’s about the gist of , HBO’s surreal, striking new series starring Jude Law as a 40-something archbishop from New York who becomes, much to the surprise of a billion congregants, the leader of the Catholic church. Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian filmmaker who wrote and directed the 10-part series, saturates scenes with the trappings of religiosity, but his real object of fascination is power: how it’s achieved, how it’s abused, and how it corrupts. There’s very little plot development beyond that, and a good degree of cinematic self-indulgence, meaning is frequently tedious in a very dazzling way. But it’s also an extraordinary portrait of the kind of loneliness and neediness that sparks in some men an almost psychopathic quest to dominate others, and of the myopic enablers who convince themselves that their work is God’s plan.
