i think the tv show 'the young pope' should be nominated for sainthood
i actually think it's a legitimate miracle that i am forced to experience emotions while jude law gets dressed in papal regalia and LMFAO's seminal hit 'sexy and i know it' plays in the background
The Young Pope is a 2016 miniseries created by Italian director and screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino, starring known dreamboat Jude Law as the titular pope-who-is-young. He’s actually 47, but that’s pretty young for a pope. Diane Keaton (Kay from The Godfather) and James Cromwell (the farmer from Babe, but more fondly known to me as Ewan Roy from HBO’s Succession and the guy who superglued his hand to a Starbucks counter because of milk, or something) are also here. Almost every other actor is some sort of western European - you’ve got Silvio Orlando (Italian), Javier Cámara (Spanish), Ludivine Sagnier (French), and Cécile de France (Belgian), to name but a few. I didn’t know any of these European actors before I saw the show, but frankly I’d die for them all at this point.
When this show was first airing, everyone’s general response was just, “What? Sorry, what?” Like, here is a show called The Young Pope, and it’s about Jude Law doing an American accent and being the pope. His name is Lenny Belardo. Lenny. Ten minutes into the first episode, he says the Cardinal Secretary of State is going to have to wait to meet him, because he won’t do anything until he’s had his Cherry Coke Zero™️. He doesn’t say ™️, but you can hear it in his voice anyway. He’s very good at enunciating. I was living in Vienna when it first came out, and the effort I had to put in to actually find an episode and watch it overrode my interest in watching it at all. I ended up watching it about four years later, in December 2020.
I didn’t know what to expect, other than the Cherry Coke Zero thing. I thought it might be one of those scandalous shows where everybody’s sexy and they’re all having sex with each other all the time. Barring that, I thought it would be some black comedy-ish political drama, a Catholic House of Cards, about a conniving, morally vacant man getting into a position of extreme power and possibly even breaking the fourth wall sometimes. I did not expect to bawl my eyes out through the last two episodes, or to be so affected by it that I couldn’t even explain why I was affected to my parents without bursting into tears again. Even seeing Jude Law lounging on a sun chair and smoking in his sunglasses and white cassock and capello romano (the big white hat) makes me want to curl up and weep.
Fundamentally, the plot is this: Lenny Belardo, an American, is elected the Pope. He’s vain, stubborn, rude, selfish, cold, and much more conservative than anyone was expecting him to be. As a result of his terrible childhood, where he was abandoned by his parents at a very young age for no apparent reason, he’s taking out his loneliness and anger on the world. Sometimes he doesn’t even believe in God. He struggles with his own faith and the relationships with his mother figure Sister Mary (Diane Keaton) and father figure Cardinal Spencer (James Cromwell), while squabbling with Cardinal Voiello, the Vatican’s Secretary of State (Silvio Orlando), and forming close relationships with Monsignor Bernardo Gutierrez (Javier Cámara), a shy and genuine priest who hasn’t left the Vatican for years, and Esther (Ludivine Sagnier), the wife of a member of the Swiss Guard, who desperately wants a child but is unable to conceive. Lenny is an irredeemably horrible man whose homophobia and misogyny makes him a threat to marginalised Catholics across the world. He’s also my precious scrunkly wunkly baby boy who never did anything wrong to anyone. Cancel me for this if you must.
On the surface it sounds like Sorrentino’s just trying to be purposefully as blasphemous as possible for the sake of scandal and attention – can you imagine, he seems to ask, what would happen if they elected a young pope? Worse, a hot pope? And even worse than all that, he was a total dick who wanted to bring the Church back to the Dark Ages? Can you even imagine? And now you’re imagining all that, also imagine that it’s Jude Law, and that there’s a scene in the show where he’s getting dressed like he’s about to go to that Catholic-themed Met Gala from a few years ago, and ‘Sexy and I Know It’ by LMFAO is playing. Saint Peter must be rolling in his grave.
It’s not that, though. Well, it is, kind of. It is and it isn’t. It’s about all of those things, but it’s also about finding faith when you’ve lost it. It’s about softening the hardest of hearts. It’s about loving someone even when it feels impossible to love them.
The monologues in this show are off the chain. Lenny does a speech in one episode where he says nothing should be more important to any Catholic than God; Catholics must love God more than their neighbours. They must dedicate their whole lives to God at the expense of their own freedom and happiness, otherwise they’re not real Catholics. To his confessor, he delivers this completely unreal monologue that I absolutely wish I’d written, about how during Conclave he prayed so hard ‘he nearly shit his pants’ that he, and not anyone else, would be nominated as Pope; he says, with conviction, that he loves himself more than his neighbour. More than God. He does a teeth-stingingly saccharine speech about how war is bad and we should stop doing it and should instead be peaceful (that one’s not my favourite, I’ll be honest with you, but it’s a nice enough sentiment). His address to the Cardinals is one of the most chilling things ever committed to film, where he tells them all with authoritarian fury that the Church will be closed and untouchable, and then makes them all kneel down and kiss his feet. It’s not just Lenny, either – one of my favourite scenes in the whole show is when Lenny asks Monsignor Gutierrez about his calling to become a priest. I literally cannot even relay the conversation without tearing up.
I watched The Young Pope twice in a pretty short space of time – according to my Letterboxd account, I finished it the first time on Tuesday 29th December 2020, and had watched all ten episodes again by Saturday 2nd January 2021 (the second time was with my parents, whom I forced to watch with me). I’m watching it again at the minute, which explains why I’m writing this now.
I don’t know if it’s just that I was struggling with my mental health the first time I watched it (I’ve written about that a little bit here) but there’s something about this show that dug right under my skin and grew roots inside me. I’m not an especially religious person. I was raised Catholic, but I haven’t ever really engaged with Catholicism in a meaningful way since I did my Confirmation when I was about sixteen. I go to church at Christmas and sometimes at Easter, and that’s about it. But honestly, seriously, genuinely, this show made me wish I was more religious. Or more faithful, I guess; that I had more faith. I wish I could look at the Catholic Church like Paolo Sorrentino clearly looks at it – with resentment and pain and anger, but also so much love.
I get weepy even thinking about parts of this show. I get weepy thinking about Lenny and his closest friend Andrew as children, walking down a country road to find Lenny’s parents. I get weepy thinking about the Prime Minister of Greenland dancing to ‘Senza Un Perché’ by Nada over the closing credits of Episode 4:
I get weepy thinking about Andrew as an adult, telling his parishioners in Honduras that he didn’t do enough to protect them from gang violence but he was grateful that they loved him all the same. I get weepy thinking about Gutierrez’s visions of the Virgin Mary, who tells him that the boy has grown into a man, but she will still protect the boy. I get weepy thinking about how Voiello loves football so much he has a custom-made Napoli strip with his name embroidered on the back, and how despite his machiavellian plotting he will drop everything to look after Girolamo, the young disabled boy who he calls his best friend. I get weepy thinking about Sister Mary waiting for Lenny and Andrew to come back to the Vatican after a night of escapism where Lenny can pretend he’s not the pope, the way they look like two young boys sheepishly trotting up the driveway to their disapproving but secretly fond mother. I get weepy thinking about the stuffed toys on Gutierrez’s bed, Esther rollerskating with the Swiss Guard children, the way the light suffuses through the windows in all of the buildings to make it seem like Lenny’s glowing.
I don’t know if this show is for everyone. I don’t know if I’m even recommending it, really. It’s weird and tongue-in-cheek but it also takes itself incredibly seriously. There’s a kangaroo in the Vatican gardens. If you’re even remotely left-wing, you’ll hate Lenny. I do sometimes too. But sometimes people develop extremely damaging, conservative beliefs because of their life experiences and their childhoods and the people they were raised by – and yes, if you can stomach it, sometimes the best way to try to help them learn is to hold their hand and treat them kindly, not to dismiss them outright and push them further to the fringes of society, where they can become radicalised and violent. I find it difficult to treat transphobes and racists and homophobes and misogynists with anything other than disdain. But I guess I’m not saint material.
The Young Pope is kind of a love letter. It’s a love letter to people who want to be more than what they are, to people who are frozen in the worst moment of their lives, to people who can’t find faith that they once had, or people who have faith but use it for the wrong reasons. It’s not a perfect show – yes, Lenny, I know war is bad and that we should stop doing it, I can’t believe you’re 47 and you’re just now having this realisation – but it doesn’t have to be perfect to be good, and actually I think it’s better that way.
Also, did you know James Cromwell is 6’7”? That’s crazy.