In the Flesh: The New Pope Episode 1

Watching the premiere of Paolo Sorrentino’s The New Pope is like inhaling a breath of clean mountain air after a decade spent living in an attic. The cleanly symbolist camera work, the idiosyncratic faces of its cast of ecclesiarchs and power brokers, the rich, brilliant colors and eclectic soundtrack — it’s creative in the most playful sense of the word, constantly shooting off course down unexpected detours. When the deadlocked college of cardinals pause for prayer we hear their thoughts float through the vast, airy chambers of St. Peter’s with unthinkable tenderness and biting, soul-destroying evil. “I want a pope who will send me to Hell,” begs one cardinal, a child rapist consumed by guilt and self-loathing, as his fingers curl through the bronze filigree of a privacy screen. The physical and political edifice which has sheltered and will continue to shelter him is also a prison for his tormented conscience.

Another implores God for a pope who will sweep away liberals, homosexuals, and other distractions and focus solely on poverty and God himself. It’s a shivering, exquisite kind of dissonance to hear someone with such retrograde views express deep love for the poor and downtrodden. Beneath it all is the unspoken fact that none of these men have the courage to go out into the world wielding their considerable power and effect the change they so long for. Their childlike deferral to a hypothetical authority figure makes it clear that the church throttles all such ambition and initiative by design. The human beauty of listening to these men air their broken, imperfect souls in abject prayer is something that walks the line between corniness and divinity, flirting with the ridiculous to touch the sublime. 

The ascension of Tommaso Viglietti, onetime confessor to the curia and a mole for Pius XIII, to the papacy is the episode’s major development. The humble, weak-willed priest -- chosen as a sop after a deadlock between Voiello and his lookalike Hernandez (also played by Silvio Orlando) -- turns on the men who cynically elected him as their puppet with a hilarious poveretto viciousness, imposing St. Francis’s rules of poverty and simplicity on the entire Vatican and opening it to displaced Middle Eastern migrants. Pope Francis II delivers his address to the college of cardinals in Birkenstocks and a simple white cassock, feet dangling a good few inches above the floor, tone gleeful as he explains that he intends to sell the Vatican itself off brick by brick. 

This, ultimately, is what gets him poisoned by cardinal secretary of state Voiello/smote down by Saint Lenny. The church is not an instrument of good or charity. The simple fact of its existence — ancient, opulent, and powerful — is enough to put that theory to bed. The church, as is obvious in its every arch and frieze, in the robes of its officiants and the haunting chants of its choirs, is an instrument of awe. You can soil it, corrupt it, even jerk off to it as a sorrowful young nun does after giving the comatose Lenny Belardo a sponge bath;  but the one thing you can't do is thwart the incredible momentum of its power and grandeur.