The Young Pope_series

The Young Pope review – stunning, thoughtful and visually arresting

 Jude Law as the young pontiff wrestling with his belief in God. Photograph: ©Gianni Fiorito

Jude Law is excellent as Pius XIII, oscillating between vindictive authoritarian and wounded man-child with surprising charm. A TV review by REBECCA NICHOLSON, The Guardian, December 16, 2016

What a gorgeous and gripping series The Young Pope (Sky Atlantic H) has been. It is not surprising, coming from the director of such visually arresting films as Youth and The Great Beauty, but Oscar-winner Paolo Sorrentino’s first adventure on the small screen has been far more than just a pretty picture. It could have been overwhelmed by its splashy premise: Jude Law is Lenny Belardo, now Pius XIII, an ultra-conservative, manipulative new American pontiff. He has serious doubts about whether he believes in God, drinks Cherry Coke Zero for breakfast and smokes more than the cast of Mad Men combined. But The Young Pope was stunning, thoughtful and dreamlike, and even though key players have been strategically shifted to dioceses around the globe, its well-earned second series can’t come soon enough.

Lenny, or Pius to his Vatican pals, has spent much of the first season establishing just what kind of Holy Father he intends to be. He was anointed on the misguided promise that he would be a pliable looker who might boost the church’s coffers by allowing his handsome image to appear on a few plates in the gift shop. But Lenny is no patsy; his idea of reforming Catholicism has been to crack down on moral transgressions and to channel Daft Punk, Banksy and JD Salinger – his own points of reference – by hiding his face from public view, so that everyone can get back to the business of learning how to be Godly again. It is as effective a marketing technique as it is a point of principle.

There was a thriller-like tautness to Gutiérrez’s eventual capture of brazen paedophile Archbishop Kurtwell – and how wonderful that The Young Pope did not shy away from covering child abuse in the church – in New York. Kurtwell tried to destroy Pius’s reputation by releasing his old love letters to the press, but their publication in the New Yorker served to boost his popularity by showing his human side, even if it was against a backdrop of global protests over his stance on abortion. (The image of the naked women, each daubed in blood with a letter from the word BASTARD, is one of many unforgettable scenes, dropped in confidently and casually.) But, eventually, Kurtwell was reeled in and banished to Alaska – a poetic fall from grace for a man once so powerful, if not perhaps the most effective punishment for a habitual paedophile.

Sorrentino has said that it is no coincidence that Pius begins as an ultra-hardline pope in an era where the real pontiff is pursuing a more liberal papacy than his predecessors. What has been fascinating about this series is how well it has demonstrated the subtleties of change and growth. Early on, Pius boots out a cardinal for admitting his homosexuality, and insists it is incompatible with the teachings of the church. But, by the season finale, his greatest ally is Gutiérrez (Javier Cámara, conveying both compassion and pain with just a flicker of his eyes), who tells him his alignment of paedophilia and homosexuality is wrong. Pius admits he may be revising his views. Besides, he has a lot of mummy (and daddy) issues to deal with before he gets on to working out whether he believes in God.

Law has been excellent as Pius, oscillating between vindictive authoritarian and wounded man-child with surprising charm. And so, after his substitute parents leave him – James Cromwell’s Spencer finally dies, and he sends Diane Keaton’s Sister Mary off to work with children in Africa – we end with a road trip to Venice, where Pius hopes he might find those hippy parents who abandoned him and don’t seem to be particularly interested that their son is now the global head of the Catholic church.

In St Mark’s Square, he finally reveals his identity to the assembled crowd. Imagine wondering what the Pope looked like for months, and then finding out he has the face of Law. Sorrentino goes all out for the final scenes, which are as intricate as the Pope’s finest robes. Pius delivers a barnstorming address, then looks at the smiling faces in the crowd through a telescope Gutiérrez picked up at the service station on the way. He sees his parents, older, disappointed, leaving. I was left unsure if it was real or a vision; there is something Sopranos-like in The Young Pope’s ease with a dream sequence. As Pius collapses, we pull back to a wide shot, of the crowd, then of the city, then of the world. It’s so assured, so sumptuous, so well done, that it can absolutely get away with a gesture as grand as this.

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Soccer and Doping? Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

By MUSA OKWONGA

The New York Times, June 25, 2018

Like the consumers of fast-food chicken nuggets, football fans may be less than comfortable knowing how our fun is made.

The World Cup continues to thrill, with exhilarating wins by England, Germany, Belgium and Colombia, and an equally exciting draw between Japan and Senegal. Away from the field, though, an old controversy has once again rumbled into view: doping.

The Mail on Sunday, a British newspaper, reported over the weekend that a Russian player, Ruslan Kambolov, who was excluded from his country’s World Cup squad because of injury, had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs 18 months ago. And according to the paper, it gets worse: Both the Russian authorities and FIFA kept this information quiet.

FIFA has swiftly rejected this version of events, stating that “insufficient evidence was found to assert an antidoping rule violation by any footballer.” But in some ways, it doesn’t matter. Even before FIFA’s denial, the story attracted little scandal. Among football fans these days, reports of doping are generally met with a shrug.

Why? Well, for one thing, drug use isn’t new to football. In a 2013 interview, Johnny Rep, who starred for Ajax and Holland in the 1970s, said that it was common to take amphetamines before matches. More recently, there were allegations that Spanish players had enhanced their performance by receiving artificially oxygenated blood. FIFA itself has expelled players from the World Cup for drug use: Willie Johnston of Scotland in 1978 and most infamously Argentina’s Diego Maradona in 1994.

Given all of that, and the steady stream of doping stories across professional sports in recent years, many fans may at this point have anger fatigue. On some level, maybe we’ve just accepted that drug use is an inevitable part of elite sports.

It’s not hard to reach this conclusion. Football, for one, is astonishingly competitive, and it’s getting faster all the time. The margins for success are getting smaller and smaller. As Amit Katwala has noted, “In 2006, when Germany finished third in the World Cup, their players spent an average of 2.9 seconds on the ball each time they had it. By 2014, when they won, that had fallen to just 0.9 seconds.” In other words, footballers at the highest level now have much less time to pass the ball before they are tackled.

What’s more, the sheer number of games that teams must play means that there is an extraordinary toll taken on players’ endurance. Each infinitesimal advantage counts, and unfathomable amounts of money and prestige are at stake. It’s hardly surprising that the pressure to seek illegal advantage, through artificially increasing stamina, may at times feel overwhelming.

And yet it sometimes seems that football and its fans have a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in place when it comes to doping. Like the consumers of delicious fast-food chicken nuggets, we may be less than comfortable knowing how our meal has been produced.

There may come a time when authorities take a more pragmatic view, assume that doping has become an inescapable part of the game, and seek not to outlaw it but to regulate it. Until then, though, it looks as if we may have to maintain the veil of innocence around the beautiful game, even as it continues to unravel.

Mr. Okwonga is a writer, poet and football fanatic. He has published two books on the sport.